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How Saddam died on the gallows

Ewen MacAskillMichael Howard

Camera footage of the final minutes ofSaddam Hussein released yesterdayshows him being taunted by Shia hang-men and witnesses, a scene that risksincreasing sectarian tension in Iraq.

As he stood at the gallows, he was tor-mented by the hooded executioners orwitnesses shouting at him to “Go to hell”and chanting the name “Moqtada”, theradical Shia Muslim cleric and leader ofthe Mahdi army militia, Moqtada al-Sadr,and his family.

The grainy images, which appeared tohave been taken on a mobile phone, dis-close exchanges between Saddam and histormentors, the moment when his bodydrops through the trapdoor, and his body

swinging, eyes partly open and neck bentout of shape. In what Sunni Muslims willperceive as a further insult, theexecutioners released the trapdoor whilethe former dictator was in the middle ofhis prayers.

Sunni Muslims, who were dominantunder Saddam, but are now the victims ofsectarian death squads, will see the sham-bolic nature of the execution as furtherevidence of the bias of the Shia-led gov-ernment. They have repeatedly claimedthat the Iraqi government, helped by theUS and British, conducted a show trial,based on revenge rather than justice.

Saddam’s team of defence lawyersclaimed that the hanging had been simply“victors’ justice”.

The unruly scenes will also dismay theUS and British governments, that are alsoprivately alarmed at the sectarian bias of

the government, led by the prime minis-ter, Nouri al-Maliki. The US and Britainbelieve at least some members of the Iraqigovernment are complicit in sectariankillings, particularly by members of thepolice force.

The Iraqi government last night deniedthe execution had been sectarian ordesigned for revenge. Hiwa Osman, anadviser to the Iraqi president, Jalal Tala-bani, told the BBC: “This whole executionis about justice.”

As Saddam was buried in this home village, Ouja, outside Tikrit, yesterdaymorning, the leaked footage appeared onthe internet and on Arabic television sta-tions. While Saddam was professingMuhammad as God’s prophet, he wasinterrupted by shouts. One of the peopleobserving the execution chants “Moq-tada, Moqtada, Moqtada”. Saddam dis-

National

Storms sweep awayHogmanay revels

International

Two killed bybombs in Bangkok

A string of nine bombs across Bangkokkilled two people and left at least 34 in-jured last night, including two Britons. Sixbombs went off in the early evening, fol-lowed by three on the stroke of midnightnear a mall popular with foreigners. No-body claimed responsibility for the blasts,which forced the cancellation of new yearcelebrations. The capital has rarely expe-rienced deadly bombings, although sev-eral small explosives were set off in therun-up to a bloodless coup that oustedprime minister Thaksin Shina-watra in September. Violenceoccurs almost daily in southern Thailand,the target of Muslim insurgents.

Financial

Belarus deal avertsGazprom switch-off

Belarus last night struck an eleventh-houraccord with Russia’s state-controlledenergy supplier, Gazprom, which avertedthe prospect of the former Soviet republicfacing a chilly new year. Moscow had saidit would stop gas to Belarus today if Minskdid not agree to pay a much higher price.The move threatened to disrupt suppliesto Europe and further undermine Russia’sreputation as a reliable energy supplier.The dispute echoed one with Ukraine ayear ago when Gazprom cut supplies forseveral days. The gas operatoris trying to bring prices closerto world market levels. Europe imports aquarter of its gas from Russia.

Sport

Mourinho’s harshwords – for Chelsea

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has givena brutal assessment of the club after the2–2 draw with Fulham on Saturday, cast-ing doubt on his managerial qualities, crit-icising players and intimating that it maynot have been his choice to sell WilliamGallas and Robert Huth. The remarks riskdamaging his relationship with his squadand directors. After complaining abouthaving no centre-half strong in the airwithout the injured John Terry, Mourinhowas asked why Huth and Gallas were sold.“Good question,” hesaid. Asked what a goodanswer was, he replied: “There is no an-swer. They are not here any more.”

London’s new year fireworks, centred onthe Millennium Wheel, went with a banglast night, but Hogmanay celebrations formore than 100,000 people in Edinburghwere cancelled after high winds, thunderand torrential rain battered revellerspreparing to welcome in 2007. Glasgow,too, was forced to cancel its open airevent, which was expected to attract25,000 partygoers. Firework displays inLiverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne werecalled off due to safety concerns, as wasan outdoor pop concert for10,000 people in Belfast. Oneman is feared drowned after he was sweptinto the sea off the Cornish coast.

6≥ 16≥ 18≥ Sport, 1≥

Leaked film reveals chaotic end • Taunts and insults hurled • Sectarian backlash fear

missively repeats the name Moqtada. Thenoose around his neck, he appears tosmile and shoots back: “Do you considerthis bravery?”

Another voice shouts at him to “Go tohell”. Saddam, seemingly accusing hisenemies of destroying the country heonce led, replies: “The hell that is Iraq?"

A Shia shouts “Long live MohammedBaqir al-Sadr,” a member of Moqtada’sfamily thought to have been assassinatedby Saddam’s security services. Anotheronlooker pleads for dignity: “Please don't,the man is facing execution. Please don't.I beg you, no!”

As Saddam continueswith his prayers, saying “Iprofess that there is no God but God andthat Muhammad …”, the executioners

Saddam Hussein hanging from a noose after execution in Baghdad early on Saturday, in a photograph seemingly taken by camera phone and obtained from an Arab-language website Photograph: AP

Continued on page 2 ≥

3-5≥

President George Bush received aharsh reminder last night of thepressing need for change to his Iraqpolicy with reports that the Americanmilitary death toll in the country hadreached 3,000 since the invasion. Thefigure, tallied by Associated Press andthe icasualties.org website, but dis-puted by the Pentagon, came a dayafter the execution of Saddam Hus-sein. Mr Bush has been consulting withhis advisers at his ranch in Crawford,Texas, over the holiday period and isexpected to announce a modified USpolicy on Iraq on January 10.

US death toll reaches 3,000

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release the trapdoor. There is a shout:“The tyrant has fallen.”

Although many Sunni Muslims alsosuffered under him and were glad to seehim go, the manner in which the execu-tion was carried out will have createdsome sympathy for Saddam. The fact thatthe execution took place at the start of themain Muslim religious holiday will furtherinflame Sunni opinion.

The tit-for-tat killings between themajority Shias, who suffered badly underSaddam, and the previously dominantSunnis, has created a de facto civil warthat could break up the country. Sunniinsurgents, particularly a branch of al-Qaida, have sought to fan the civil war bycarrying out a series of devastating carbomb attacks on Shia population centres,particularly Sadr City in Baghdad andtowns such as Hilla and Najaf.

The response among Sunnis to thehanging and the video was to swearrevenge. A man from Mosul, a mixed cityin the north, told Reuters: “The Persianshave killed him. I can't believe it. By God,we will take revenge.” He was referringto Iraq's new leaders’ ties to Shia Iran, andthe Shia in general.

Accusations that the government hadmishandled the execution were not con-

fined to Sunni regions. In the Kurdishregion, there was also criticism. “Thisexecution should have been for all of Sad-dam’s victims, and instead they havehijacked it and turned it into a sectarianevent,” said Anwar Abdullah, a student atthe technical institute of Sulaymaniyah.

Rebwar Suliman, 21, whose uncle andgrandfather were killed by Saddam’ssecret police in Kurdistan in the 1980s,said: “It does a dishonour to the Kurds.”

Saddam was buried in the dead of night,prompting an outpouring of grief andanger from fellow members of his tribe andother Sunni Arabs. His body was flown byUS military helicopter to Tikrit and thentaken to the village where he was born.

Hundreds of mourners visited his tombinside a marble-floored hall built by Sad-dam. Others attended the Great SaddamMosque in Tikrit.

The funeral came as it was reported thatthe US death toll in Iraq since the invasionhad reached 3,000. The US military haddisclosed yesterday that an Americansoldier had been killed by a roadside bombin Baghdad on Saturday, the 2,999th deathsince the invasion in 2003. But the web-site www.icasualties.org, yesterday alsolisted the death of Specialist DustinDonica, 22, on December 28 as previouslyunreported, bringing the total to 3,000.

George Bush is expected to facerenewed domestic political pressure fol-lowing the latest milestone. Although the3,000 figure is symbolically important forAmericans, Iraqis suffer that rate of casu-alties on a monthly basis.

Tariq Ali, page 20≥Peter Preston, page 21≥Leader comment, page 22≥guardian.co.uk/iraq≥

How Saddamdied on thegallows

≤ continued from page 1

Monday 01.01.07

The final countdownFrom Berlin to Baghdad, Bird fluto Boy George, we give you theyear in numbers Page 7 ≥

Ground warIn a fightback against the globalspread of the frappuccino andother imitators, Italy has certifiedwhat it considers the classiccappuccino Page 17 ≥

CommentThe obituarists will not have thelast word on Saddam, any morethan they did on Stalin, writesPeter Preston 1 ≥

In g2

In this section

First person specialHow was 2006 for you? For fivevery different people – from apregnant teenager to a Kabuldoctor who escaped the Taliban –it was the year when everythingchanged Page 4 ≥

Reasons to be cheerfulThe world is coming to an end.But it’s not all bad news – there’s anew vaccine for hay fever, Ugandais back on the tourist trail, andCharlotte Church has put hersinging career on hold Page 29 ≥

National 6

Law 13

International 16

Eyewitness 14-15

Financial 18

Comment & Debate 20-21

Leader comment 22

Reply 23

Obituaries 24-25

Weather & Crossword 27

Short cuts g2, 2-3

Last night’s TV g2, 19

Radio & Satellite g2, 20

Television g2, 22

Puzzles g2, 24

Quick Crossword g2, 24

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Index

The unselfish geneThe human paradox is that it mayhave been our propensity tomurderous violence that causedus to evolve altruism, writesAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk/commentisfree

TravelSimon Hoggart joins Guardiancartoonist Steve Bell for anaudio tour of their favouritehaunts in Brightonguardian.co.uk/travel/audio

NewsblogSimon Jeffery samples thereactions of Arab bloggers to theexecution of Saddam Husseinblogs.guardian.co.uk/news

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‘I have beenkeeping halfan earcocked fornews of theAshes – didsomeonereally try tosell ourbowlingplans to theIranians?’MartinKelner.Sport, page 20

The Guardian | Monday January 1 2007 3

Saddam execution

A tomb in a mosque near Tikrit –which will become a shrine for some

Images

to have been shot on a mobile phone.Looking up at the scaffold, the jerkyviewfinder settles on the figure of theformer dictator. His mouth moves, but hiswords cannot be heard in the video.

Saddam is seen through the red railingsof the scaffold, his face illuminated by alight above him and the occasional flashof a camera as the noose is placed aroundhis neck and he begins to recite a Muslimverse: “There is no god but God, andMuhammad is his prophet.”

His words are interrupted by the open-ing of the trapdoor beneath and his fall,pixellated by the crude video. A crash isheard, and the camera swings and sways

about in the tumult as voices shout incelebration. Seconds later, the camerasettles on the image of Hussein’s bloodiedhead, lying horizontal with the noose heldupright by an unseen hand.

The amateur quality of the video, withits inadequate, green-hued light, erraticaudio and jerky camerawork, seem to addto its authenticity.

The video was immediately posted toseveral websites, endlessly reproducingitself as it was linked from site to site. “Iam linking to it, because I believe it is im-portant people have the choice of decid-ing for themselves [whether to watch theexecution],” announced Lostremote.com,after noting that the news channels wereshowing official footage that stopped atthe point when the noose was placedaround Saddam’s neck. “The truth is thatonce the video is out there, everyone willfind it.”

The news channels concurred, decidingto show fragments of the video. “I wantto do this with a measure of taste,” NBCNews president Steve Capus told the NewYork Times, “but I don’t want to stand inthe way of history.”

While the video is gruesome, it con-forms to one of the oldest of dramatic con-ventions: the act of violence remains off-stage. Viewers see the build-up and the af-termath; the moment of death is notcaptured.

The power of the mobile phone with its shaky, hand-held video footage

Dan Glaister Los Angeles

As TV debated the morals of showing ex-plicit images of what it trumpeted as theDeath of a Dictator, the video of SaddamHussein’s execution was already circulat-ing on the internet.

“Awaiting first pictures of Saddam Hus-sein execution” read the news flash onCNN as an Iraqi government national se-curity adviser who had witnessed the ex-ecution told the channel that it would besome time before a decision on whetherto release the footage would be made.

While CNN was running its Death of aDictator special, Fox News Channel, theother leading purveyor of rolling news,preferred Date with Death. But neithercould keep up with the news. And thedebate about the niceties of showing thestark images of death had already beentaken out of the western media’s hands.

Like so much footage shot on the ubiq-uitous mobile phone, from acts of policebrutality to misbehaving politicians, theraw information had circumvented thetraditional instruments of control.

First on Anwarweb.net and subse-quently shown on Arabic television chan-nels, the video soon spread to file-sharingwebsites such as Google Video, YouTubeand Revver.

The shaky, hand-held footage appears

Body flown for privateburial in home town

Original plan was forsecret, unmarked grave

Ghazwan al-Jibouri Awja

Pledging revenge, hundreds of mournersflocked to Saddam Hussein’s tomb in hishome village in northern Iraq on Sunday,where the ousted leader was buried inprivate after being hanged for crimesagainst humanity.

In an outpouring of grief and angerfrom Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs at theShia-led government that rushed throughthe execution, mourners knelt and prayedby the tomb in Awja over which the Iraqiflag had been draped.

Sectarian passions that have pushedIraq toward civil war since US troops over-threw Saddam in 2003 could be further in-flamed by a video posted on the internetshowing Shia officials taunting him as hestood on the gallows on Saturday.

“The Persians have killed him. I can’tbelieve it. By God, we will take revenge,”said a man from the northern city ofMosul, using a term employed by some

Sunnis to describe Shia Arabs, who sharetheir faith with non-Arab, Persian-speaking Iran.

“All we can do now is take it out againstthe Americans and the government,” saidanother mourner who paused by the tombin a marble-floored mosque hall in Awja,near the Tikrit. A portrait of a smilingSaddam wearing his trademark fedora hatwas propped up on a chair.

Groups of several dozen mourners tookturns to pay their respects. Mint tea andcoffee were served in an adjacent room,where Saddam was referred to by many asa martyr against the US occupation.

A member of Saddam’s Albu Nasir tribesaid there were plans to found a religiousschool and library at his burial site.

“We want to make this place an appro-priate and suitable edifice. This will hon-our Saddam Hussein,” said Muayed Al-Hazaa, who described himself as a cousinof Saddam. “We want to turn the placeinto a religious school and a library.”

The government had initially indicatedthat Saddam’s body might lie in a secret,unmarked grave, fearing it could becomea pilgrimage site for Ba’athist rebels andSunni Arabs.

But after lobbying from Albu Nasir forthe ousted dictator to rest in Awja, a UShelicopter flew Saddam’s body by night toTikrit, where it was delivered in a coffinto the governor of Salahaddin province,Mohammed al-Qaisi, tribal chieftain Alial-Nida and other local officials.

Saddam’s body was later driven to Awjain a police vehicle and buried in themiddle of the night, after it was washedand covered in a white shroud. Saddam’stwo sons Uday and Qusay, killed by UStroops in 2003, lie in a family plot in Awja’scemetery.

The burial was attended by a smallgroup of people. Symbolic funerals wereheld in other Sunni towns and cities inIraq, including the Baghdad insurgentbastion of Amriya.

Around 100 of his supporters gatheredshouting Saddam-era slogans in Tikrit in ademonstration that was broken up by Iraqiarmy troops.

Ignoring hesitation among Sunni Arabsand Kurdish members of his government,the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki,rushed through the execution of hisformer enemy in a move that boosted hisauthority among fellow Shia Muslims. Butmany fear it could further exacerbatesectarian passions among Sunnis.Reuters

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The execution captured on handset

Gesture of defianceA masked man holds up a pictureof Saddam Hussein in Baiji,112 miles north of Baghdad onhearing news that the formerdictator had been buried earlyyesterday following his executionPhotograph: Nuhad Hussin/Reuters

I fell inlove – andshe flewoff toAustraliag2, page 4

Al-Iraqiya TV images of Saddam’s coffin

4 The Guardian | Monday January 1 2007

Saddam execution

Reaction

Dismay among Kurds thatgenocide case unanswered

Under Iraqi law, all outstanding chargesagainst an executed person must bedropped. Without the interest that wouldbe caused by the presence of the chief de-fendant, Kurds fear that their past suffer-ing will attract less attention from fellowIraqis and the international community.

A spokesman for the Kurdish president,Massoud Barzani, said: “We hope thatSaddam’s execution will lead to a newchapter among the Iraqi people, and toending innocent people’s sufferings.” Buthe added: “We also wish that the execu-tion not be used as an excuse to ignore thedocumentation of the enormous crimescommitted against the Kurds.”

“How can I be sad that the tyrant isgone? It is like a dream come true for thesurvivors in my family,” said Herro Mah-moud, a primary school teacher in Sulay-maniyah who lost her father and uncle tothe Anfal (which means spoils of war).“But I think they should have waited un-til the other cases had been heard, and allthe scale of the other atrocities would beknown.”

Other Kurds said they felt cheated.“Saddam was hanged for the murder of148 people in Dujail. But why won’t heface the court for killing hundreds of thou-sands of Kurds? Do our dead and our trau-matised people not deserve to be hon-oured?” said Bijar Ahmed, an English stu-dent at the university of Koi Sanjaq.

Mahmoud Othman, a prominent Kur-dish MP in Baghdad who survived severalassassination attempts by the formerregime, criticised the Iraqi government’sapparent rush to carry out the death sen-tence before the end of the Anfal trial.

“It was very important to keep himalive so that we could know the fulldetails of what happened during all theatrocities that were committed,” he said.“We need to know how and why he didwhat he did and who helped him, by pro-viding political and material support tohis regime.”

Saddam had taken many secrets to hisgrave, he said, including vital knowledgeabout “the foreign companies and coun-tries that supplied the parts and expertiseto make chemical weapons.”

Additional reporting by Alan Attoof inSulaymaniya

Michael Howard

Iraq’s Kurds expressed satisfaction yes-terday at the death of Saddam Hussein,but their joy was tempered with disap-pointment that their greatest tormentorwould never face justice for what he haddone to them.

Saddam had been standing trial in a sec-ond case on charges of genocide againstthe Kurds during the Anfal campaign inthe late 1980s, during which more than4,000 villages were destroyed and morethan 100,000 people killed in a series ofmilitary sweeps in the Kurdistan regionthat included the regular use of chemicalweapons.

The former dictator was also due to faceseparate charges over the gas attack onHalabja in March 1988 that killed 5,000Kurds. Sources at the special tribunal try-ing Saddam and six members of his for-mer regime in the Anfal trial said yester-day that proceedings would resume onJanuary 8. The remaining defendants areAli Hassan Majid, known as Chemical Ali,a cousin of Saddam, described by Kurdsas the evil face of the Anfal campaign; Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai, formerdefence minister; Sabir Abdul Aziz Douri,director of military intelligence; HusseinRashid Mohammed, a senior military officer; Taher Tawfiq Ani, former gover-nor of Nineveh province; and Farhan Mut-laq Jubouri, head of military intelligencein northern Iraq.

Ewen MacAskillDan Glaister Los Angeles

As George Bush hacked down brushwoodand rode his bike at his Crawford ranchthis weekend, he gave the impression ofa US president little preoccupied by twoIraq milestones that complicate his delib-erations on a change of strategy.

The first, the hanging of Saddam Hus-sein, found Mr Bush asleep, and accord-ing to advisers he spent only a short timediscussing the execution. The second, thereports of the 3,000th US fatality in Iraq,evinced a only general remark.

“The most painful aspect of the presi-dency is the fact that I know my decisionshave caused young men and women tolose their lives,” Mr Bush said at an end-of-year press conference in Texas. A WhiteHouse spokesman added simply that thepresident “will ensure their sacrifice wasnot made in vain”.

The 3,000 figure was arrived at by theIraq Coalition Casualty Count, an internet-based monitoring group, and by theAssociated Press, which keeps its owntally of US military deaths. The Pentagondisputed the figures, saying that the totalof confirmed dead was 2,983. Nonethe-less, the widespread reporting of the grimmilestone appeared set to offset whateverboost Mr Bush will get from the newsabout Saddam’s death.

The White House is due to announce anew course for Baghdad on January 10.Time is running out for the US and Britishgovernments. The insurgents and thoseengaged in the sectarian killing can affordto wait. But domestic political pressures

put a question mark over American stay-ing power.

As a former Texas governor who signeda near-record number of death warrants,Mr Bush will have had few qualms aboutthe execution. There was also a personalelement: he blamed Saddam for an assas-sination attempt on his father during avisit to Kuwait in 1993.

But far from marking the closure of anera in Iraq, Saddam’s execution willexacerbate sectarian tensions. The fearsof the minority Sunni Muslims will havebeen increased by the comments of hisShia executioners in support of the Shiamilitia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr.

Mr Bush acknowledged the scale of theIraq crisis on Saturday in a short statementon Saddam’s death. Abandoning the gung-ho approach of past years, he cautionedthat Saddam’s demise would not halt theviolence. “Many difficult choices and fur-ther sacrifices lie ahead,” he said.

A US adviser involved in the talks on anew strategy said: “There is recognitionthat the present strategy is not working.But alternative options are limited.” Thesource said there was a general disillu-sionment in the US administration withthe Shia Muslim-dominated governmentled by the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki,which is increasingly viewed as condon-ing — or at least failing to act against — sec-tarian killing. “It would have been easierto implement a new strategy in 2005. Itgets harder every day. We have paintedourselves into a corner with this [Iraqi]government,” the source said.

The debate within the administrationabout what to do next is still to beresolved. Dick Cheney, the vice-president,is leading those in favour of the “surge”approach: sending a further 20,000-40,000 US troops to Baghdad to reinforcethe present US force of 140,000 in a finalattempt to subdue the Iraqi capital.

But the White House was given severalwarnings yesterday from figures acrossthe political spectrum that any change of

course in Iraq should be conducted in con-sultation with the new Congress. RichardLugar, the outgoing Republican chairmanof the Senate foreign relations committee,told Fox News that should the adminis-tration proceed with any move to increasetroop numbers without involving Con-gress, Mr Bush could anticipate “a lot ofhearings, a lot of study, a lot of criticism”.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former na-tional security adviser to President JimmyCarter argued that only a surge in troopnumbers, of 300,000-400,000 would

debate is being conducted against adomestic political background in whichopposition to the war is growing.

A senior US military source identifiedthe core of the problem as the US pursuitof democratic government ahead of secu-rity and economic reconstruction. WhatWashington had ended up with was anIraqi government that shared differentobjectives from America: establishing thedominance of the Shia rather than foster-ing reconciliation and unity. He said theview of the US military in Iraq is that thepolice force was so riddled with sectari-anism that the only possible course wasto disband it and start again; it was alsorife in the Iraqi army, a trend encouragedby the Iraqi government.

“We are still in charge. The Iraqi gov-ernment is a facade,” the military sourcesaid. “How can our strategy be to acceler-ate the handover to this government andthe Iraq army. This is a rush to failure.”

The British government privatelyshares the US administration’s disap-pointment with Mr Maliki.

Saddam’s execution posed a specialproblem for the British government, givenits opposition to the death penalty. TheForeign Office said it had made repeatedapproaches to the Iraqi government,making clear its opposition to the execu-tion. Officials had planned a last-minuteplea for clemency by the ambassador,Dominic Asquith, to the Iraqi president,Jalal Talabani, and Mr Maliki. But the planwas abandoned. A Foreign Office sourceconfirmed yesterday that no finalapproach to the Iraqi government wasmade by a senior British diplomat.

Tony Blair, questioned about theprospect of the death penalty in Novem-ber, proved initially reluctant to denounceit, but eventually did so. On Saturday, theforeign secretary, Margaret Beckett,reiterated Britain's opposition to the deathpenalty but welcomed the fact that he hadbeen tried by an Iraqi court. “He has nowbeen held to account." she said.

Graves of victims at Halabja, Kurdistan

Deadline looms as US toll reaches 3,000 All eyes on January 10date for new course in Iraq

Disillusion with Shiadominated government

make a difference. Speaking on CNN, MrBrzezinski criticised the core group gath-ered around Mr Bush to determine Iraqpolicy. With the exception of the new de-fence secretary, Robert Gates, he noted “anarrow decision-making group embeddedin its own opinions … is now making thedecision about a change of course.”

Also feeding into the White House arethe views of the Pentagon, the state department, the intelligence services and,the catalyst for the rethink, the Iraq StudyGroup report, published last month. The

Mr Bush this week. ‘Difficult choices lie ahead’ he said Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

‘He’s quitehandywith hisarrers, buthe’s amoodybuggerand helooks likeBambi’SamWollastonon RobinHood. g2,page 19


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Michael Howard

The execution of Saddam Hussein couldforce the Ba’ath party to choose a newleader, sparking an internal battle thatcould weaken its activities just as it wasbeginning to re-emerge as a serious forcein the Sunni insurgency, a senior Iraqi in-telligence official predicted yesterday.

“With Saddam gone and the two lead-ing figures fighting over control of Ba’athparty funds, they may tear themselvesapart,” the official said in Baghdad.

Other Iraqi and western analystswarned that the death of its leader wouldpush the organisation further into thehands of Syria — where key figures in theIraqi Ba’athist leadership are thought tobe hiding — increasing the leverage theDamascus government is able to wieldover Iraq’s internal affairs.

In what appeared to be the openingshots of a leadership contest, a statementsigned by a previously unknown groupcalling itself the Baghdad Citizens Gath-ering and handed out at the party’s officesin Amman and Damascus yesterday,pledged loyalty to Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri,a long-time Saddam confidant who es-caped capture after the US-led invasionand is believed to be in Syria.

But the Iraqi intelligence official said itwas likely al-Douri would face a challengefrom younger Ba’athist figures such as Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, a formerBa’ath party member accused of fundingand leading insurgency operations.

Battle for newleader likely

Ba’ath party

Brian Whitaker and agencies

The Arab world was divided over thehanging of Saddam Hussein, with theMiddle East’s two leading satellite TVchannels reflecting the divisions betweenShia and Sunni Muslims.

On Qatari-owned al-Jazeera, a succes-sion of commentators criticised the exe-cution, while its main rival — Saudi-ownedal-Arabiyya — provided a platform for Iraq’sShia politicians to justify their action.

Whatever ordinary viewers thought, noone disputed that it was a big moment inTV history: the first televised executionof an Arab leader.

“People are confused. This is the end ofa tyrant but also of a prisoner of war whofought the west,” Khalaf Alharbi, editorof the Saudi tabloid Shams, told Reuters.

Satisfaction at his death was strongestamong Shia Muslims. For one Iraqi Shiacleric performing the hajj in Saudi Arabia,the “stoning the devil” ceremony hadextra significance this year.

“We were also stoning Saddam,” SayedHassan Moussawi told the Jeddah-baseddaily, Arab News.

A group of Iranian pilgrims broke into

cheers on hearing news of Saddam’s exe-cution, the paper reported.

Among Sunni pilgrims from Iraq, themood was more subdued and many re-fused to talk about it to journalists. “We'renot here for politics, we're here to getcloser to God,” Sheikh Khatab Mustafa,from the Baghdad district of Azamiyah,told Arab News. “Saddam can come andgo, but God remains eternal.”

The official Saudi news agency, appar-ently reflecting the government’s view,said Saddam’s execution had drawnstrong disapproval from observers be-cause it took place during the holy monthof Dhu al-Hijjah, and was on the first dayof Eid al-Adha, when Muslims slaughtersheep to commemorate the prophet Abra-ham’s willingness to sacrifice his son forGod.

Many saw the timing as symbolic,though they interpreted it in differentways. “This is the best Eid gift for hu-manity,” said Saad bin Tifla al-Ajmi, for-mer information minister of Kuwait, theoil-rich state invaded by Saddam’s forcesin 1990. Others saw it as a mockery of theirreligion. Pakistani pilgrim ManzarMuhammad Baloch likened Saddam to asacrificial sheep. “This is a warning to allthe leaders in the third world,” he toldArab News. “If America so chooses, thiswill be your fate too.”

In the West Bank, hundreds of Pales-tinians took to the streets to mournSaddam’s death. About 700 held a mockfuneral in Jenin and chanted “Death toBush”, “Death to al-Maliki” (the Iraqiprime minister) and “Death to al-Sadr”(the radical Iraqi Shia cleric).

In Jordan, demonstrators from thePalestinian Fatah movement and mem-bers of Jordanian Islamic and leftist par-ties rallied at Baqaa refugee camp on theoutskirts of Amman. A statement de-scribed Saddam as a “martyr who waskilled by the Americans and their allies inthe Iraqi government”.

A group of Ba’athists in Jordan callingthemselves Baghdad's Citizens Gatheringpledged allegiance to Saddam's fugitivedeputy, Izzat Ibrahim, and named him the“legitimate president of Iraq”.

“We vow to liberate our country fromthe heinous criminals, neo-Zionists andthe Persians in order to restore Iraq'sunity,” the group said in a statement.

Event underlines divisionbetween Shias and Sunnis

Timing during holy monthis seen as significant

Emotions in Arabworld range fromelation to outrage

Mourning Palestinians hold pictures ofthe late Yasser Arafat and Saddam

Reaction Saddam’s family tree

How astomachoperationchangedmy lifeg2, page 7

Father

Hussein al-Majid. Died either before or

shortly after Saddam was born.

Half-brothers

Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti

— presidential adviser, in US

custody awaiting trial

Watban Ibrahim Hassan

al-Tikriti — presidential adviser,

in US custody awaiting trial

Barzan Ibrahim Hassan

al-Tikriti — presidential adviser,

former director of Mukhabarat

intelligence service, in US

custody, sentenced to hang.

Dham Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti

— died in the 1980s

Sons

Uday — killed by US troops on

July 22 2003

Qusay — Saddam’s heir appar-

ent, killed by US troops on July

22 2003

Ali (with Samira Shabandar) was

never a significant figure in the

regime, and was not officially

recognised by Saddam. Thought

to be in Lebanon.

Mother

Sabha. After Saddam’s father died, she

remarried, to Hassan al-Ibrahim,

father of Saddam’s three half-brothers.

Died in 1982.

Wives

Sajida (a first cousin) — believed

to be in Qatar, daughter of his

uncle Khairallah Tulfah

According to news reports,

Saddam married three other

women:

Samira Shabandar in 1982. The

couple have a son, Ali. She is

thought to be living in Lebanon

under an assumed name.

Nidal Hamdani, probably mar-

ried in 1990 and Iman Howeid,

in 2001

Daughters

Raghad, the eldest daughter,

living in Jordan where she was

granted government sanctuary.

Rana, living in Jordan. Relations

between Raghad and Rana and

their father were strained after

the assassinations of their hus-

bands, Hussein Kamel Hassan and

Saddam Kamel. Saddam was

accused of being responsible for

their deaths. They had called for

a revolution.

Hala — his youngest daughter,

thought to be living in Qatar with

Sajida. Hala’s husband, Sultan al-

Tikriti, was deputy head of tribal

affairs under Saddam. He was

taken into custody in April 2003.

Saddam Hussein

Saddam flanked by his wife Sajiba and Hussein Kamel Hassan, husband of Saddam’s daughter Rana, with (behind left to right)daughters Rana, Raghad and Hala, sons Uday and Qussay, and Raghad’s husband, Saddam Kamel Hassan Photograph: AFP


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Fax: 020-7239 9787


Edinburgh’s Hogmanay party falls foul ofatrocious weather as 2007 enters with a blast

Security personnel clear Princes Street in Edinburgh last night after bad weather forced the cancellation of Hogmanay celebrations Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

Glasgow, Liverpool andNewcastle events hit

One killed, one missingas weather takes its toll

Steven Morris

Gales, thunderstorms and driving rainforced major new year celebrationsthroughout the UK to be cancelled lastnight as revellers endured a wet andwindy start to 2007.

Thousands braved a squally Londonnight for a firework spectacular on theSouth Bank, but more than 100,000 peo-ple in Edinburgh had to conjure up last-minute alternatives after the official Hog-manay party was called off because ofatrocious conditions.

Organisers and partygoers weredeflated, but few questioned the movegiven the sideways rain and squally gustslashing the Scottish capital.

The Edinburgh event was to have fea-tured the Pet Shop Boys and Paolo Nutini.Andrew Holmes, the director of citydevelopment, said: “It was clear we weregoing to have bad weather, but we wereconfident it would not deteriorate to theextent that we would need to call it off. Irecognise the disappointment, particu-larly to those who enjoyed other Hog-manay events over the past two days."

It is the second time in the past fouryears that the Hogmanay event had to becancelled in Edinburgh as a result ofstormy weather. And it was the same storyin Glasgow, where high winds andshowers forced organisers to call off theevent just hours before the first of the per-formers were due on stage. Firework dis-plays in Liverpool and Newcastle uponTyne also fell victim to the weather, whilean open air concert in Belfast was can-celled as winds reached 70mph.

Severe winds wrought havoc to mo-torists on the roads, and police said a num-ber of traffic accidents had been caused inScotland due to trees felled by the winds.

A New Year's Day party in Brighton withDJ Fatboy Slim, and London's New Year'sDay parade were set to go ahead.

The by now traditional display of spec-tacular pyrotechnics at the London Eyepassed off with the usual oohs and aahs,the 10-minute display this year featuringboats launching fireworks from theThames itself.

The Met Office said a deep Atlantic lowwas responsible for the savage weather.Gusts of up to 80mph, which can causedamage to buildings, were battering partsof Scotland, northern England and north-ern and west Wales yesterday evening.

Perhaps those who missed out becauseof the weather were lucky. Research fromthe Yorkshire Bank suggested that mil-lions of people decided to stay at home onNew Year's Eve not because of the weatherbut because of high prices charged atpubs, clubs, restaurants and taxi drivers.

According to the survey, one in threeplanned to stay at home and watch tele-vision and one in five preferred to enter-tain friends at home. One in eight saidthey would be in bed before midnight.

One family who wished they couldhave been tucked up in their own homelast night were the Wiltshires. Their housein Elberton, Gloucestershire, was struckby lightning early yesterday, passingthrough the metal frame of 15-year-oldSophie Wiltshire’s bed. She sufferedbruises and an asthma attack, but rubberstops on the bedstead are thought to havesaved her from serious harm. She said:“There are black marks on my wall. I justremember falling asleep and the nextthing I knew I was outside the house. I wasvery lucky, but it's all a bit strange."

Sophie's mother, Judy, 48, said: “It wasterrifying. It sounded as if a bomb hadgone off." The family were taken in byneighbours last night.

The storms claimed a number of victims,including Rebecca Smith, 18, who waskilled when a tree fell on a caravan inStaffordshire. Two 19-year-old friends wereinjured. In Cornwall, a young man wasfeared drowned in Cornwall after he wasswept away from a beach near Padstow.

Eyewitness, pages 14-15 ≥

New Year

Lavish show in Sydney, first dawn from Mount Fuji

Jeevan Vasagar

A vast crowd gathered to watch fire-works lighting up the sky over Sydneyharbour, while thousands in Japanclimbed mountains to greet the firstdawn of the new year.

Sydney was one of the first big cities tocelebrate, with a lavish firework displaymarking the 75th anniversary of theopening of one of the city’s most famouslandmarks, the Harbour Bridge. Thebridge, which opened in March 1932, wasused as a platform for some of the100,000 fireworks released yesterday.

In Japan, police expected 95 millionvisitors to Buddhist temples and Shintoshrines over the next three days aspeople offer prayers for peace, healthand prosperity. Many Japanese climbedmountains, including Mount Fuji,overnight so they could reach the top intime for sunrise.

In New York, at least a million rev-ellers were expected in Times Square forperformances by singers Christina Aguil-era and Toni Braxton, while in Brazil,more than 2 million people were ex-

pected at the Copacabana and Ipanemabeaches to watch a firework show andconcerts by Brazilian and foreign musi-cians, including the Black Eyed Peas.

In India, police arrested two suspectedIslamic militants at a busy railway station

in Delhi. The pair were less than a milefrom the site of the Indian capital’s mainNew Year’s Eve celebrations.

Chinese authorities deployed nearly aquarter of a million police in Beijing toprevent New Year fireworks accidents.The government lifted a 12-year ban onfirecrackers in the inner city last year butthe ban remains in force around culturalsites, stations, the airport and hospitals.

In the Philippines, the popularity offirecrackers proved hazardous for nearly300 people who were injured by fire-works and celebratory gunfire in the twoweeks ahead of New Year’s Day, a 75%increase on last year.

Across South-East Asia, stormyweather and powerful waves in coastalareas dampened festivities.

Romania and Bulgaria were celebrat-ing joining the European Union fromtoday.

In Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, organ-isers set up stages for a fireworks showand an outdoor party that was expectedto draw 40,000 people. The blue andgold EU flag fluttered across Bucharest,the Romanian capital, and strobe lightsflashed through the sky.

‘There are big blackmarks on my wall where the lightning hit. I was very lucky’

Around the world

Taipei’s 101 tower was used in display

Feeling rotten this morning? A break-fast of toast and honey is the idealhangover cure, according to theRoyal Society of Chemistry. Honey —or, if you prefer, golden syrup — pro-vides the sodium, potassium andfructose the body needs after a goodnight out. The toast is merely some-thing to put it on. Dr John Emsleyfrom the Society, said (the queasymight care to look away here): “Ahangover comes from acetaldehyde— the toxic chemical into which alco-hol is converted by the body. Itcauses a throbbing headache, nau-sea, and maybe even vomiting." Thegood news: “Generally, it will be goneby midday,” according to Dr Emsley.And the “hair of the dog” theory?More bad news. “It only works if it relieves alcohol withdrawal symp-toms, which suggests you are becom-ing addicted." Steven Morris

Hangovers

Call0870 836 0840For a selection of Reader Offer holidays visit: guardian.co.uk/travel/readeroffersEmail: [email protected]

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7 days from £499 Departures on selected dates March - June and August - October 2007Andalucia is simply one of the most beautiful corners of Europe. It’s a land where theexcesses of the 20th century seem not to have taken root and where travellers aregenuinely welcomed as honoured guests, rather than as tourists. This is the landimmortalised by the writings of Ernest Hemingway and beloved by Orson Welles. It’sthe real Spain of Carmen, Figaro and Flamenco. Rich with the legacies of the Moorsand the Romans, its charm and sheer delight are captivating.

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2006 in numbers

£91,000,000£73,350,000

£21,000,000

4,000,000

655,000

6,000

1,000

46

45

20

17.8

145

2.16

Baby boys named Jack this year

Amount Jackson Pollock's No 5, 1948, fetched in a privatesale, the most paid for a painting to date

Approximate amount so far recovered following the £53mheist at a security depot in Tonbridge

Number of British adults who would struggle to read the lyrics to Robbie Williams'sAngels because of poor literacy skills SOURCE: DFES

Number of ‘bomblets’ from cluster bombs fired by Israel intoLebanon during the July/August conflict

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimate of thenumber of Iraqis killed as a result of 2003 invasion

Profit made by German football authorities from hosting the World Cup

17,800,000

1

Number of people who died in the Java earthquake in July

Approximate number of crew and passengers killed after anEgyptian ferry sank in the Red Sea in February

Average yearly income in pounds sterling for British childrenthrough pocket money and financial gifts SOURCE: CARTOON NETWORK

6,928

£821

25

62The cost in pence each Briton has spent to support the Royal Family for the year

Number of articles in UK national newspapers mentioning video-sharing website Youtube in the firsthalf of 2006. 905 Number in the second half of 2006

Number of tickets sold for a Bob Geldof concert in Milan – he pulled out of the performance at the 12,000 capacity venue

Percentage of British office workers who hate their workmates SOURCE: PARTNERS STATIONERS

Percentage of British families who eat every evening mealwhile watching TV SOURCE: GREAT BRITISH CHICKEN SURVEY

17.8C (64.04F) Average night and day temperature for the UKin July — the hottest month since such records began in 1914

Number of British troops killed in the Nimrod MRS aircraft crash in Afghanistan —the biggest single loss of life in conflict since the Falklands

Number of days Boy George spent sweeping New York streetsas part of a community service sentence

The exact time in the afternoon that people in Britain haveleast amount of energy to carry out a task SOURCE: TYPHOO

Number of outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu in Britain (virus foundin a dead Whooper Swan in Cellardyke, Scotland)

RESEARCH: ALAN POWER

20

%

25

%


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Home to the most extensive ancientcivilisation, the Renaissance, the RomanCatholic Church and the Vatican. Blendthese with the striking natural beauty ofthe Tuscan countryside, theeffervescence inside every Italian andyou have an unbeatable destination for atour.Florence,Siena, Assisiand Rome -the namessimply say itall.

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Police check CCTV afterattack on London estate

Neighbours claim ganghas intimidated residents

Jeevan Vasagar

Police yesterday launched a murder in-quiry after a pensioner was found beatento death on an east London estate whereneighbours claimed a gang of youths hasbeen intimidating residents.

Ferozur Rahman, 83, was found un-conscious with head injuries on Fridayand died in hospital on Saturday night. MrRahman, a father of seven, had lived onthe Toynbee estate in Bethnal Green for20 years and knew the disgraced cabinetminister John Profumo, who worked onthe estate after he quit his job in 1963.

Detectives visited local businesses yes-terday to check for CCTV footage and ap-pealed for witnesses. His attackers mayhave been trying to burgle his ground-floor flat but police said it was unclearwhether anything had been stolen.

Residents say they have campaignedfor better security measures. DennisDelderfield, who chairs the residents’association, said: “Flats are constantlyburgled and a blind woman was attackedhere two years ago. It's a very scary placeto live and we always get abuse shoutedat us and spat on.”

Arthur Rumble, 79, said: “Normallythere are six or seven of the gang mem-bers hanging around here. They causehavoc. They drink, shout abuse and dodrugs. I have been here for five years andthe first night I came here I was mugged,and I haven't been out after 3pm since.”

Mr Rahman’s son-in-law Abjal Hussain,

43, said he was not aware of any recentproblems with antisocial behaviour.

“This happened a long time ago, as faras I can remember, but not recently. Therewas a problem in the area but not with himparticularly. Apart from that, I don'tknow."

Describing Mr Rahman, he said: “Hewas a good man who was likely to helpeveryone. He was like a communityworker … When I think about what hap-pened I am very shocked. We are not re-ally taking it in."

Despite being invited to move in withrelatives, Mr Rahman had preferred to liveon his own after the death of his wife, MrHussain said.

Detective Inspector Larry Smith, head-ing the murder investigation, said: “MrRahman was a frail, elderly man. He waslast seen alive at 9.30pm on Thursday andunfortunately he was found by his 17-year-old grandson on Friday at 2pm.

“There had been a forced entry into theflat and he had suffered a head injury.” Apostmortem is to take place today.

Mr Smith said: “Someone must haveseen something. There would have been alot of noise and someone must have puttheir head out the window and seensomeone running off. We are still in theearly stages of the investigation and can'tsay if anything was taken from the flat orwhat the motive may have been.

“This was a ghastly crime. Why wouldyou assault an 83-year-old when youcould just run away?"

The Toynbee Hall complex, which runssocial projects, is best- known as the placewhere Mr Profumo worked after he re-signed from the Macmillan governmentover his affair with Christine Keeler.

Anyone with information should con-tact the incident room on 020 8345 1585or call Crimestoppers anonymously on0800 555 111.

‘999 adverts’ to help youngtell on website paedophiles

Ferozur Rahman, and police officersat the Toynbee estate where he lived

Bobbie JohnsonTechnology correspondent

Social networking sites such as MySpacemay be ordered to play adverts for theemergency services — including the num-ber 999 — on their pages under plans beingconsidered by the Home Office.

The tactic is one of a number of recom-mendations being considered by minis-ters in a document seen by the Guardian.According to the document, officials be-lieve that websites should be doing moreto safeguard children on the internet.

Draft guidelines for good practiceamong internet companies suggest thatthey should be working harder to preventimages of nudity being placed online.

The Home Office believes that adver-tising the 999 emergency number will en-courage young surfers to report suspiciousencounters directly to the police.

Other options include more stringentchecks on age and identity, which wouldhelp to deter older users from mas-querading as children. Online groomers often pretend to be a child to befriend po-tential victims. Most social networks onlyrequire an email address for membership.

The paper also suggests ways of pro-viding better protection for young inter-net users. Age restrictions could be usedto prevent them being contacted by olderusers, or to prevent them from accessingmaterial deemed unsuitable for children.

“Young people on the whole use the in-ternet positively, but sometimes in waysthat may place them at risk of harm,” saysthe document, drawn up by a workinggroup of representatives from the govern-ment, internet companies and child pro-tection organisations. “Service providersshould, where possible, request and vali-date personal information from users … tominimise the risk of impersonation.”

The perceived danger of this has grownover the past year as social websites have

grown rapidly. MySpace — the huge net-working site owned by Rupert Murdoch’sNews Corporation — last month overtookYahoo to become the biggest site on theinternet. But such sites have also comeunder fire for what some have claimed isa lax approach to safety. In America My-Space was accused of inaction after itmistakenly allowed a number of regis-tered paedophiles to use its services tocontact children. The site now has a fil-tering system to exclude sex offenders.

It is not just MySpace which is targetedin the government consultation, however.The Home Office document also points to-wards popular sites including Facebook,Xanga, Piczo and Faceparty. Law enforce-ment officials believe the inability toprove people’s identity online is a barrierto protecting younger users.

US navy names sailors who diedafter being washed off deck of sub

The US navy yesterday named the twosailors who died after being washed offthe deck of a nuclear submarine atPlymouth.

British safety experts have begun an in-vestigation into the deaths of the twoAmerican sailors. Specialists from theMarine Accident Investigation Branch(MAIB) are to interview two other sailorsfrom the USS Minneapolis-St Paul whosurvived the accident with minor injuries.

The submarine has continued on itsvoyage but its skipper, Commander EdwinRuff, and his officers will be questionedwhen it returns to port.

The US navy named the two victims asSenior Chief Petty Officer Thomas E Hig-gins, 45, of Paducah, Kentucky, and PettyOfficer Second Class Michael J Holtz, 30,of Lakewood, Ohio.

The Americans have also started an in-quiry into the accident, which happenedas the crewmen were clearing the deck ofthe submarine as it left Plymouth Soundon Friday.

Lieutenant Chris Servello, of the US 6thfleet headquarters in Naples, said: “Thecause of the accident remains underinvestigation.”

The British inquiry is being conductedjointly by the police and the MAIB, whowill also be interviewing the crews of twoBritish boats that helped in the rescue.

The American crewmen were hit bybreaking waves as the ship left the shelterof the harbour and were exposed to thefull force of the sea and the wind.

They were on deck wearing lifelines,which kept them attached to the ship af-ter they were swept into the sea. Theywere dragged behind the submarine as itslowed and were rescued by British sailorsfrom a pilot boat and two launches thatwere escorting the boat out of harbour.

They were taken to Derriford hospital

Transit van excavated as a relic

Martin Wainwright

British archaeologists have found a newrelic of the past to dismantle: a 1991 FordTransit van. Three months of painstakingresearch has seen the light van broken upinto hundreds of ‘finds’ and archived.

Chosen to test techniques on “a com-mon and characteristic part of contempo-rary life,” the vehicle was given to Bristoluniversity by the Ironbridge museum inShropshire. Everything from a Victorianthreepenny bit, dropped down a crack inthe floor of the van, to crude spot-weldshave been scrutinised and recorded.

“In many ways it has been like a con-ventional study in field archaeology,” saidCassie Newland, a doctoral student at Bris-tol who organised the project as a trial of

archaeology’s potential to help in theanalysis of modern British society.

Three separate layers within the vanwere then carefully excavated, yieldinglost pencils, dog hair and confetti from adistant museum party.

Fingerprint dusting proved that theTransit was one of Ford motor company’sfirst British vehicles made by robots — “adiscovery reflecting a huge social changein employment,” said Ms Newland.

All finds are to be reported in British Ar-chaeology magazine and other data on theTransit, one of only 191 surviving modelsof its type and year, will be kept at Bristolfor future study. Ms Newland said:“Archaeology concerns the interpretationof material culture in pursuit of under-standing. That material can be van just asa prehistoric ditch or settlement.”

in Plymouth, where two died and two oth-ers were discharged to the sick bay at theHMS Drake base in Plymouth.

Coastguards said there was a severegale force-nine at the time with windsgusting to 47 knots, and the sea was veryrough.

The 6,000-tonne USS Minneapolis-StPaul was launched in 1983 and has a topspeed of more than 25 knots. It is nuclearpowered and in 1992 became the first sub-marine to fire a Tomahawk cruise missile.

Speed of wind inknots which thesubmarineencountered afterleaving the shelterof Plymouthharbour

47

Murder hunt after man, 83, isbeaten to death in break-in

‘Withoutmy baby Iknow Iwouldstill besmoking20 a dayand bingedrinkingon cherryLambrini’g2, page 7

“The problem is that identity as we un-derstand it is changing,” said Jim Gamble,chief executive of the Child Exploitationand Online Protection Centre, whichtracks down abusers and focuses much ofits effort on the internet. “It used to bethat we took people’s names, date of birth,and their address. Now people identifythemselves in a different way — their in-ternet address, username, email.” Thishas forced investigators to come up withhi-tech information tracking techniquesto track down offenders who use the net.

Alex Hewitt, the founder of NetIDme,which sells online age verification ser-vices, said traceable identities would helpto prevent attacks.

guardian.co.uk/technology ≥

MySpace — theinternet’s biggestsite — was accusedof inaction aftermistakenly lettingpaedophiles use its services


National

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I know I’m right, dancernamed by Guardian says

English National Balletfaces calls for dismissal

Hugh Muir

Officials from the English National Balletfaced calls to sack one of their leadingdancers yesterday after Simone Clarkedefied criticism and gave a detailed inter-view defending her support for the BritishNational party.

Two weeks after she was named by theGuardian as a card-carrying member of thefar right group, the ballerina hit out at hercritics, voicing her belief that the BNPseemed to be the only party “willing totake a stand” against immigration. Sheclaimed that her boyfriend Yat Sen-Chang,who is also an acclaimed lead dancer,encouraged her to join the BNP. Sen-Chang is of Chinese-Cuban extraction.

Clarke, 36, who will take the lead in theENB’s production of Giselle at the LondonColiseum next week, said she had beencalled a “racist and a fascist” since herdecision to join the BNP 18 months agobecame public.

One report claimed that following theGuardian’s revelations, fellow dancersconfronted her before a matinee perfor-mance of The Nutcracker.

But she said: “I’ve never been clearer inmy head that I’m moving in the rightdirection and at the right time. I’ve hadnearly 300 emails supporting me from allover the UK and from as far away as Aus-tralia, America and New Zealand.”

She told the Mail on Sunday: “Every-thing will be different now. I will beknown as the BNP Ballerina. I think thatwill stick with me for life.”

But she added: “I don’t regret anything.I will stay a member.”

The interview has caused fresh diffi-culties for the ENB, which was able todeflect criticism about Clarke’s BNP mem-bership by insisting that her stance was anentirely private one. The company, whichis publicly funded and is therefore obligedby the Race Relations Act of 2000 to pro-mote good race relations, will be asked toexplain how one of its highest profile em-ployees was able to use her position as aplatform for the far right party.

Her views and policies espoused by theBNP appear to conflict with equality poli-cies that operate in the company itself andthose laid down by Arts Council England,which subsidises the ENB to the tune of£6m a year.

Its policy says funded organisations“must be aware of how their work con-tributes to race equality and promotinggood race relations”.

Prior to the interview, the ENB had saidit hoped to talk to its dancer beforedeciding “what action to take”.

Lee Jasper, equalities director for themayor of London and chairman of theNational Assembly Against Racism, said:“The ENB must seriously considerwhether having such a vociferous mem-ber of an avowedly racist party in such aprominent role is compatible with theethics of its organisation. I seriously doubt

that it is and that should lead to her posi-tion being immediately reviewed. I thinkshe should be sacked.” He called on fun-ders and David Lammy, the arts mnister,to intervene.

Inayat Bunglawala, of the MuslimCouncil of Britain, said people had a rightto their private political views but added:“This will taint the ENB in the eyes ofmany minority communities. Questionsneed to be asked about how someone inthat position can be allowed to abuse that

position to promote the BNP.” Jon Crud-das, Labour MP for Dagenham in east Lon-don, where the BNP forms the officialopposition on the council, said: “We needto know how these statements squarewith the more laudable positions taken bythe ENB and other leading arts organisa-tions. What she completely ignores is theunderbelly of the BNP in terms of theviolence, the physical attacks and thecriminality of many of its supporters.”

A spokeswoman for the Commission

for Racial Equality, which polices race re-lations legislation, said it was monitoringevents. “We will be interested to see whataction the ENB takes given that it has amember expressing such views in public.”

An ENB spokeswoman said the com-pany was not yet in a position to com-ment.

Clarke’s membership became public inreports by Guardian reporter Ian Cobain,who used a pseudonym to join the farright party and was quickly selected tobecome its central London organiser. Dur-ing his seven months undercover, Clarketold him that immigration “has really gotout of hand”.

She told the Mail on Sunday how shetravelled to London from her home inLeeds aged 10 to begin her training at theRoyal Ballet School after winning one of23 places sought by 4,500 entrants.

John CarvelSocial affairs editor

The Department of Health appears to haveremoved a research report from its web-site because the findings would have dis-credited the government’s programmeaimed at giving NHS patients more choice,doctors’ leaders claimed last night.

The research, commissioned by thedepartment, found that people did notwant to have to select a hospital whilethey were seriously ill, preferring such de-cisions to be made by a trusted GP.

It said there was no evidence thatgreater choice would improve quality ofcare, and good reason to fear it would ben-efit only the wealthy and articulate.

The British Medical Association tookcopies of a summary of the research thatappeared on the department’s website lastmonth under the department’s officiallogo. It made them available to the Guard-ian after the online version disappeared.

The study was commissioned in 2004by the health department’s research arm,the NHS service delivery and organisationR&D programme. Its summary found thatpatients wanted better information about

treatment options but thought they weregiven too little information to be able toexercise choice effectively.

But a department spokesman said:“The views they came up with were notthose of the [department] and the logowas used without our permission. Weraised the issue of the logo and asked forit to be removed. We were not aware thatthey would take the whole thing off.”

Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary,

and prefer decisions to be made on theirbehalf by a well-informed and trustedhealth professional. Evidence that pat-ients want the opportunity to select a dis-tant hospital for non-urgent surgery is lim-ited to situations where [they] face a longwait for a local hospital appointment andwhere there is a history of poor service.”

Their summary said: “Wealthy andeducated populations will be the mainbeneficiaries of a policy of extending pat-ient choice, unless measures are intro-duced to help disadvantaged groups.”

Hamish Meldrum, the BMA’s GP chair-man, said: “The paper supports a lot ofwhat doctors knew instinctively aboutpatients and choice. At times whenpatients’ needs are not particularly urgentthey may appreciate choice … in an emer-gency, patients tend to want to go wheretheir doctor recommends.”

The department spokesman said a fullversion of the research was published ayear ago. “The summary paper reflectedthe personal view of the researcher anddid not present a balanced summary ofthe actual research, which does not findthat offering choice is misguided.”

SocietyGuardian.co.uk/health ≥

Doctors claim study on patient choice suppressed

has insisted over the past year thatpatients want more choice. By 2008,patients needing non-emergency treat-ment will be entitled to choose any NHShospital in England and any private hos-pital that meets NHS standards.

But according to the commissionedstudy, by researchers at Manchester andCardiff universities: “Most severely illpatients face complex treatment options

BNP ballerina defies rising clamour to sack her

Her conversion to the far right wasprompted by watching the televisionnews and then reading the BNP mani-festo. “I am not too proud to say that a lotof it went over my head but some of thethings they mentioned were the things Ithink about all the time, mainly massimmigration, crime and increased taxes.I paid my £25 there and then,” she said.

She protested that it is “really silly” topoint to her partner’s non-English origins,adding: “It is not about removing for-eigners. It’s about border controls.”

Nine of her 10 principal dancers at theENB are immigrants and she suggestedthat this may have muted the internalresponse, adding: “There are a lot of for-eign dancers who have probably nevereven heard of the BNP.”

guardian.co.uk/farright ≥‘I don’t regret anything.’ Simone Clarke performing in Westminster Abbey in 2005 Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA

‘I will be known as theBNP Ballerina. That willstick with me for life’ Simone Clarke

‘Her position should beimmediately reviewed.She should be sacked’Lee Jasper

‘This will taint the ENBin the eyes of manyminority communities’Inayat Bunglawala

Patricia Hewitt, thehealth secretary,insists patientsusing NHS servicesdesire more choicein how and wherethey are treated


National

Transport

Strike forces rail operatorto cancel most services

Hundreds of senior train conductors be-gan a second wave of strike action yester-day, forcing Central Trains to cancel morethan half of its services. The Birmingham-based operator said it was running around400 of its 1,200 services planned for NewYear's Eve and would restrict services to“key routes" on New Year's Day. The RailMaritime and Transport union said it ex-pected solid support from its members forthe 48-hour strike, which follows a 24-hour stoppage on Christmas Eve. The dis-pute is over pay for working on ChristmasEve and New Year's Eve and the introduc-tion of a computerised rostering system.

Accident

Teenager dies in stolencar veering off road

The driver of a stolen car died in a crash in Cambridge just after 5am yesterday. Asecond man and a woman were hurt.Police said the stolen grey Vauxhall Novaleft the road shortly after officers in amarked patrol car attempted to stop it. Itwas not clear whether the car was beingchased when it crashed. “When signalledto stop by police officers the Nova isbelieved to have driven off at speed ...crashing a few moments later,” policesaid. The occupants were thought to be all teenagers. The Independent PoliceComplaints Commission is to investigate.Press Association

Courts

George Michael chargedwith being unfit to drive

Pop star George Michael has been chargedwith being unfit to drive after an incidentin which he was found passed out in hiscar, police said yesterday. The singer willappear at Brent magistrates court in Lon-don on January 11 after he was arrested innorth London in October. Michael, 43, wasfound by officers after motorists dialled999 to report his car was causing anobstruction at traffic lights in Crickle-wood. He was arrested on suspicion ofbeing unfit to drive and for possession ofwhat was believed to be cannabis. Thesinger was taken to hospital before beingcautioned. Press Association

Emergency services

Fire at flats kills two inScottish fishing town

Two people were found dead yesterdayafter a fire at a four-storey tenement inFraserburgh, a fishing town in the north-east of Scotland. Emergency servicesreceived a call about the fire at midday.Three men and a woman were rescuedfrom the block of flats by Grampian fireand rescue service and were taken tohospital suffering from the effects ofsmoke inhalation. Grampian police said:“We can confirm two bodies havebeen found within the scene. Inquiriesare at an early stage and no details ofidentity will be released at this time."Press Association

Health

Pay parents to get pupilsto cycle, obesity plan says

Parents could be paid to get their childrento cycle to school rather than take the bus,under plans to tackle obesity in govern-ment guidance to councils piloting schooltransport schemes. The guidance said theproposals would improve school trans-port, cut congestion and encouragechildren to lead more active lives. Butparents' groups raised concerns about thesafety of children cycling up to three milesto school each day, and said that the pay-ments would “send the wrong message”.Government figures show that more thana million children will be obese by 2010.Press Association

Heritage

McKellen and councilcross swords over plaque

The tussle between Gandalf (aka Sir IanMcKellen) and Burnley borough councilintensified yesterday when the Lancashiretown produced a birth certificate todefend its siting of a commemorativebirthplace plaque for the actor. Last weekSir Ian said he was not born at the site,25 Scott Park Road, Burnley, which at-tracts many Lord of the Rings pilgrims. Hisclaim that the council got it wrong hasnow gone back to court, with a 1939 cer-tificate giving the address as the birth-place of one Ian Murray McKellen. Sir Ianhas given Burnley hospital as the place ofhis arrival. Martin Wainwright

Science

Gene that doubles breastcancer risk is identified

Scientists have found a gene that doublesa woman’s risk of developing breast can-cer, if damaged. The gene, PALB2, has alsobeen implicated in a newly identified dis-order that causes tumours in children.Breast cancer is the most common formof cancer in the UK and around 44,000women are diagnosed each year. The In-stitute of Cancer Research estimates thatfaults in the PALB2 gene contribute toaround 100 cases of breast cancer in theUK each year. One of the 10 breast cancercases identified as being linked to PALB2was a male breast cancer. Around 300cases are diagnosed each year. Alok Jha

Bryan Bourne emerges in slippery formafter the annual mud race, a charityevent, on the banks of the Blackwaterriver in Maldon, Essex

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National

Are youreally toosick towork?The rise of‘party flu’g2, page 3

Stern jobs warning as Bulgaria and Romania join EU

A man buys a European flag from a street vendor in Sofia Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Workers face £1,000 finesif they breach restrictions

Visitors will have access to free NHS treatment

Patrick Wintour Daniel McLaughlin Bucharest

People from Romania and Bulgaria, whichjoin the EU today, were given a sternwarning by the Home Office yesterdaythat they would face £1,000 on-the-spotfines if they breached the restrictions thatprevent their working except in someseasonal agricultural work and a smallnumber of highly skilled jobs.

But the Department of Health con-firmed that, in common with other citi-zens of EU member states, all Romaniansand Bulgarians will have access to freeNHS treatment while visiting Britain.Previously visitors from the two countrieshad needed a visa.

A health department circular a fortnightago stated that Romanians and Bulgarianswere to get free health treatment in linewith other EU member states and wouldneed to show their passport to gain med-ical assistance. However, elective treat-ment and any treatment for pre-existingconditions that could be dealt with in theirhome state would be excluded.

It is the first time that Britain has im-posed labour market restrictions on citi-zens from an EU member state. It followsintense cabinet debate on the “politicaldangers” of allowing Romanians and Bul-garians to seek work. The two have a com-bined population of about 30 million.Only Ireland has so far followed suit withsimilar restrictions.

The government underestimated thenumber of citizens it thought would cometo Britain for work in the first wave of east-ern European accession states in 2004,and how many would elect to work here

for an extended time. It is still not surewhat the longterm impact of the cheaplabour might be on inflation and employ-ment in the UK.

Ministers are allowing up to 20,000low-skilled Bulgarians and Romanians aright to six months’ employment in agri-culture — work previously undertakenlargely by Ukrainians. Otherwise they willhave to seek work permits for specifichighly skilled jobs, or where there are

specific jobs for which no UK applicantsare available. A worry for the governmentis whether these rules will be widelybreached.

In Bucharest, on the eve of joining theEU, most people dismissed predictions ofan exodus of young talent to Britain orother EU states, saying instead theywanted to make the best of EU member-ship at home.

“I want to stay here. If can’t make it at

home, I won’t make it anywhere,” saidRazvan Popescu, a tourism student at theUniversity of Bucharest. “I would like tostay here and make a business with Euro-pean Union funds. We are not expecting amiracle — people know the EU is not a landof dreams.”

Relief in Romania and Bulgaria at be-coming the 26th and 27th members of theEU was palpable last night, as the coun-tries’ leaders celebrated joining the bloc

before its door closed, at least temporarily.The Romanian prime minister, CalinTariceanu, drank a toast at midnight withcounterparts from several other Europeanstates and top EU officials.

The Romanian president, TraianBasescu, marked the arrival of 2007 inBucharest’s University Square, which hasbeen a traditional centre of the city’s newyear celebrations since the revolution of1989 which toppled Nicolae Ceausescu. InTransylvania, the medieval city of Sibiucelebrated the start of its year as a Euro-pean capital of culture.

The average Bulgarian earns £130 amonth. The populations of the two coun-tries make up the poorest in the EU. Poleswere fleeing up to 20% unemployment athome, but the economies of Romania andBulgaria have been booming.

Unemployment is low and labour short-ages are leading firms to hire workers fromChina, Turkey, Ukraine and Moldova.

“Most people who wanted to leave havealready gone,” said Ionel Danca, chiefeditor of Romania’s Eurolider politicalmagazine. “I don’t think we will see a bigchange now — in fact, many people mightsee opportunities here and come homeafter spending years abroad.”

Mihail Arghiropol, who works for aBucharest advertising firm, said thatRomanians from poor, rural regions mighthead west, but he did not think therewould be a brain drain. “The biggest mis-take now would be to leave,” he said. “Themarket is saturated abroad and lots ofmultinationals are coming here. For us,the future is Romania.”

guardian.co.uk/immigration ≥

The number inthousands of low-skilled Bulgariansand Romaniansgaining the right tosix months’ farmwork in the UK

20

Legal age for buying tobaccoraised to 18 from October 1

Tories ‘party of working people’

Patrick Wintour

The Tories are to make an audacious bidto show they are the party of working peo-ple by looking at measures to help thepoor rise up the social ladder.

David Cameron said yesterday: “Wemust show that unlike Labour, we will bea party that is for working people, not richand powerful vested interests.”

He has also asked shadow home secre-tary David Davis to head a new Conserva-tive taskforce to look at ways of ending theslowdown in social mobility that has oc-cured under the Labour government.

The move, part of an attempt to showthe Tories are no longer simply the mouth-piece of big business also follows the re-

cent Tory assertion that relative and notjust absolute poverty must be cut.

Mr Davis’s taskforce, appointed by MrCameron, will be separate from the workbeing undertaken by the social justice pol-icy commission headed by Iain Duncan-Smith. It underlines the extent to whichMr Cameron is going to face a formidablechallenge next year in marrying the con-flicting polices likely to emerge from hisvarious working groups in the autumn.

Mr Davis has been chosen to lead thetaskforce partly since he himself symbol-ises the value of meritocracy. He wasraised on a council estate and went to acomprehensive school before developinga successful business career.

Leader comment, page 22≥

Patrick Wintour Political editor

Under-18s will be banned from buying cig-arettes in England and Wales from Octo-ber 1, the public health minister CarolineFlint confirmed yesterday. In Scotland theban comes into force in March.

Shops that break the new laws couldlose their licence to sell tobacco for as longas a year. Lifting the legal age for buyingtobacco from 16 to 18 brings the law intoline with rules on the sale of alcohol.

A ban on smoking in enclosed publicplaces comes into effect on July 1, withministers setting aside £29.5m for localauthorities to enforce the law. A councilsuch as Manchester will receive £263,000.Smoking will be banned from NHS andgovernment buildings from today.

The move came as Hazel Blears, theLabour chair, admitted that the looseningof the licensing laws would not haltBritain’s drinking culture. She suggestedBritons enjoy getting drunk because theyenjoy risk-taking.

“I don't know whether we'll ever get tobe in a European drinking culture, whereyou go out and have a single glass of wine.Maybe it's our Anglo-Saxon mentality."She was Home Office minister when thedrinking hours were introduced in 2005.

Anti-smoking campaigners welcomed

lifting the legal age for buying cigarettes.Government statistics show that 9% ofyoung people aged 11 to 15 smoke, downfrom 13% in 1996. Most buy cigarettesfrom small corner shops. A trading stan-dards survey in 2005 found that 12% ofshops were willing to sell tobacco to chil-dren clearly under 16.

Ms Flint said: “Smoking is dangerous atany age, but the younger people start, themore likely they are to become lifelongsmokers and to die early.

“Someone who starts smoking aged 15is three times more likely to die of cancerdue to smoking than someone who startsin their late 20s. Buying cigarettes hasbeen too easy for under-16s, and this ispartly due to retailers selling tobacco tothose under the legal age.

Deborah Arnott, director of ASH (Ac-tion on Smoking and Health), welcomedthe change but said the current fines onretailers were pitiful, with most given averbal warning.

Only 23% of under-16s trying to buy to-bacco found it difficult to do so, accord-ing to a previous Department of Healthstudy. The Association of ConvenienceStores (ACS), which represents around32,500 shops, called on the governmentto invest heavily in a campaign to explainthe change to consumers.

guardian.co.uk/smoking ≥


National

Lost tape could be Hendrix version of Welsh anthem

Steven Morris

He famously played his own screechingversion of the Star-Spangled Banner atWoodstock but it has emerged that JimiHendrix may also have had a bash at an-other national anthem: the Welsh one.

The version of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau,Land of My Fathers, was discovered on theend of a dusty eight-track tape which hadlanguished for years in a forgotten teachest in a north London recording studio.

Experts believe the ear-rattling rendi-tion may be Hendrix as the track appearson the end of a recording by a group whichfeatures a friend of his. He is believed to

have been in London when the tape wasmade. And it does sound rather like him.

The recording was found when DaveChapman, a producer, was sorting tapesdiscovered at the studio on Crouch Hill.Most turned out to be unremarkabledemos by little known bands but at theend of a recording of a group called theNew Flames, a wild, distorted version ofthe Welsh anthem screamed out.

Mr Chapman had left the control room,thinking the New Flames recording wasover. But he had left the door open andsuddenly heard Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau belt-ing out. Friends said it made the hairs onthe back of his neck stand on end.

A little detective work established that

the New Flames' bass player, Viv Williams,had known Hendrix well and lived roundthe corner from the studio.

The recording’s owner, Martin Davies,a record producer and writer, said he waskeen to establish if it was by Hendrix. Itmay be particularly valuable because itwould be among the last recordings hemade before he died in 1970, aged 27. MrDavies said: “We would know exactly whomade the recording if we could find VivWilliams. He must now be about 64 yearsold. If anyone knows his whereabouts,please let us know."

The recording can be heard at www.thereddragonhood.com/pages/jimi.html

No religion andan end to war:how thinkerssee the future

Alok Jha Science correspondent

People’s fascination for religion and super-stition will disappear within a few decadesas television and the internet make it eas-ier to get information, and scientists getcloser to discovering a final theory ofeverything, leading thinkers argue today.

The web magazine Edge (www.Edge.org) asked more than 150 scientistsand intellectuals: “What are you opti-mistic about?” Answers included hope foran extended human life span, a bright fu-ture for autistic children, and an end to vi-olent conflicts around the world.

Philosopher Daniel Denett believes thatwithin 25 years religion will commandlittle of the awe it seems to instil today. Thespread of information through the internetand mobile phones will “gently, irresistibly,undermine the mindsets requisite for reli-gious fanaticism and intolerance”.

Biologist Richard Dawkins said thatphysicists would give religion anotherproblem: a theory of everything thatwould complete Albert Einstein’s dreamof unifying the fundamental laws ofphysics. “This final scientific enlighten-ment will deal an overdue death blow toreligion and other juvenile superstitions.”

Part of that final theory will be formu-lated by scientists working on the LargeHadron Collider, a particle accelerator atCern in Geneva, which is to be switchedon this year. It will smash protons to-gether to help scientists understand whatmakes up the most fundamental bits ofthe universe.

Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Har-vard University, highlighted the declineof violence: “Most people, sickened by thebloody history of the 20th century, findthis claim incredible. Yet, as far as I know,every systematic attempt to documentthe prevalence of violence over centuriesand millennia (and, for that matter, thepast 50 years), particularly in the west, hasshown the overall trend is downward.”

John Horgan, of the Stevens Institute ofTechnology, New Jersey, was optimistic“that one day war — large-scale, organisedgroup violence — will end once and for all”.

This will also be the year that we get togrips with our genomes. George Church, ageneticist at Harvard Medical School, be-lieves we will learn “so much more aboutourselves and how we interact with ourenvironment and fellow humans”.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist atCambridge University, focused on autisticchildren, saying their outlook had neverbeen better. “There is a remarkably goodfit between the autistic mind and the dig-ital age,” he said. “Many develop an intu-itive understanding of computers, in thesame way other children develop an intu-itive understanding of people.”

Leo Chalupa, a neurobiologist at theUniversity of California, Davis, predictedthat, by the middle of this century, itwould not be uncommon for people tolead active lives well beyond the age of100. He added: “We will be able to regen-erate parts of the brain that have beenworn out. So better start thinking whatyou’ll be doing with all those extra years.”

Leading thinkersargue that people’sfascination withsuperstition — andreligion — willdisappear within afew decades

Jimi Hendrix: did he record Land of My Fathers? Photograph: Ray Stevenson/Retna

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Law

Writ largeNew law lordtook defiantstand on tortureevidence

Had it been the USsupreme court, itwould have beenfront page news andhe would have be-come a householdname. But as we’retalking about our

own top court his appointment has beenannounced with a minimum of public-ity. There is a new law lord, David Neu-berger, whose appointment will bemuch welcomed in civil liberties circles,mainly for a judgment he gave in 2004,when he was in the court of appeal.

The issue was whether evidence ob-tained by torture could be taken into ac-count by the home secretary to detainsuspected terrorists. Two of the threeappeal judges said yes. The third, Neu-berger, took an impassioned standagainst the majority. He said that “de-mocratic societies, faced with terrorist

threats, should not readily accept thatthe threat justifies the use of torture, orthat the end justifies the means. It canbe said that, by using torture, or even byadopting the fruits of torture, a democ-ratic state is weakening its case againstterrorists by adopting their methods,thereby losing the moral high ground anopen democratic society enjoys.” On aless serious note, I can safely say thatNeuberger is the first law lord in historyto have a sister-in-law who is both arabbi and a member of the house oflords, Baroness (Julia) Neuberger.

There is only a month left for buddingQCs to send in their applications andthey are going to need every moment(plus just under £3,000 for the privilegeof being allowed to apply). It’s just possi-ble that there exists, somewhere in theworld, an application form longer thanthe 118 pages they need to complete

(the guidance on how to fill it in takes 16pages). But I cannot believe that anyoneelse seeking advancement has to pro-vide so many referees. Twenty-four ofthem. But not just any old 24. Twelve ofthem have to be judges or arbitrators; sixpractitioners and six clients. But just tointroduce a touch of lottery about theprocess, only nine of the 24 will actuallybe asked to give their opinions to the se-lection committee; how the lucky ninewill be chosen is a mystery.

I mention these procedures in orderto ask: is this not making the QC contestan absurdity? For heaven’s sake, it’s noteven a job these people want, only theright to put two letters after their namesand earn a lot more money as a result. Italmost (but not quite) makes you wishfor the good old days when QCs werechosen because someone had whisperedto the lord chancellor that they weregood chaps, not too bad at their work.

What awaits our legal ministers in 2007?Gordon Brown, of course, but how willhe shuffle his pack of lawyers? There’s ageneral feeling that Tony Blair’s friendCharlie Falconer will not survive as lordchancellor and chief of the Departmentfor Constitutional Affairs. For the firsttime, according to the recent, controver-sial Constitutional Reform Act, the lordchancellor will no longer have to be alawyer, nor indeed a member of theHouse of Lords.

Will Mr Brown have the courage to givethe most ancient and glittering office inthe land, once held by Thomas More, toan ambitious party apparatchik who may,in his or her past life have been — an an-guished gulp from the lawyers — ateacher, social worker or local authorityofficial? I think not, and here’s a way outfor him. Make Lord Goldsmith the lordchancellor and DCA boss, and Harriet Har-man the attorney general.

Marcel Berlins

Compensationwarning overforcing workersto retire at 65

Clare Dyer Legal editor

Lawyers are warning employers that theycould face compensation claims if theyforce workers to retire at 65 — even thoughcompulsory retirement at that age is law-ful under UK legislation.

Legal experts expect employment tri-bunals to “bank” any claims by employ-ees made to retire at 65 against their will,pending the outcome of a challenge to themandatory retirement age at the Euro-pean court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg.

The ruling could take as long as twoyears but if the challenge succeeds, unfairdismissal and age discrimination claimsare likely to be allowed to go ahead as longas the employee filed the claim withinthree months of being made to retire.

The UK was required by an EU directiveto bring in regulations, which came intoforce last October, banning discriminationagainst workers on the grounds of age.Employees can ask to stay on after 65 andemployers have an obligation to considerthe request in good faith but have the rightto turn it down without a reason.

Heyday, a sister organisation to AgeConcern, launched a high court challengeto the rules, arguing that by keeping themandatory retirement age ministers hadfailed to implement the directive properly.The government agreed to allow the ques-tion to go straight to the European courtfor a definitive answer.

If the court agrees with Heyday it willmean the regulations were wrong all alongand will open the way for compensationclaims from anyone forced to retire at 65

since October 1 2006. With people livinglonger and healthier lives but with theprospect of smaller than expected pen-sions, the numbers wanting to stay oncould be large.

When Heyday surveyed more than56,000 people in their 50s and 60s, 58%said they would like to be able to workafter the state pension age. One in foursaid they had already been forced into re-tirement by their employer.

Employers will be able to avoid claimsif they can produce a good reason otherthan age for making a worker retire, butthis may not be easy. Some businesses areconsidering abandoning the compulsoryretirement age, according to NabarroNathanson, a City employment law firm.

Its latest briefing on age discriminationfor clients warns: “Employers should re-view retirement policies and related de-cision-making procedures. To maintain acompulsory fixed retirement age couldlead to a long period of uncertainty and alarge number of potential claims.

“On the other hand, to attempt to jus-tify each retirement on objective groundsis a complex process, which many em-ployers had hoped to avoid … In the faceof such uncertainty, some businesses arenow considering abandoning a compul-sory retirement age altogether.”

Sue Ashtiany, head of the firm's em-ployment group and a discrimination lawexpert, said: “I'm advising employers thatif they make people retire at 65, they'dbetter have a good objective reason for do-ing so other than the age itself.”

Proportion of the56,000 surveyedby Heyday, backedby Age Concern,who said theywould like to carryon working after 65

58%

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Eyewitness 00.10am 01.01.07 London


In with the newFireworks explode above the LondonEye in central London this morning tomark the beginning of 2007. The display, now a traditional part of thecapital’s revels, rivalled celebrationsacross the globe and was largelyunaffected by poor weather that hitthe rest of the UK. Photograph: AdrianDennis/AFP/Getty



InternationalForeign editor: Harriet Sherwood

Telephone: 020-7239 9549

Fax: 020-7239 9787


Series of bombsin Bangkok killtwo and injure at least 30

Jonathan Watts BangkokAssociated Press

A volley of nine bombs shattered year-endcelebrations in Bangkok last night, killingtwo people and wounding at least 34,including two Britons.

Six near-simultaneous bombs at vari-ous points across the capital in the earlyevening were followed by three explos-ions shortly before midnight at CentralWorld Plaza, a chic shopping mall withdesigner stores popular with expatriates.The location was close to where the maincountdown celebration for New Year hadbeen due to take place before officialscalled it off.

The injured Britons were named asAlistair Graham, 47, and Paul Hewitt, 55.Mr Hewitt told the Guardian he had beenhailing a taxi when an explosion rippedacross the street. “There was a huge flashand then I saw blood pouring out of myarm,” he said. “Funnily enough I didn’tfeel anything.” Neither was seriously hurt.The other injured foreigners were a Hun-garian, an American and two Serbs.

Such episodes are a rarity in Bangkok,though the blasts came at the end of a yearof unrest in Thailand, including a militarycoup that ousted the prime minister,Thaksin Shinawatra, three months agoand an increasingly violent Muslim insur-gency in the south of the country. Nobodyclaimed responsibility for the blasts,which sparked a big security clampdownacross the city after the first bombings.

At least five of the first six bombs weredetonated by timers within a 15-minuteperiod in areas of the city not normally fre-quented by foreigners. The bombs, somestuffed with nails, wounded about 20 peo-ple seriously while the rest returned homeafter treatment at hospitals, said thehealth minister, Mongkol Na Songkhla.

The final three bombs, left in bags at theside of the road, went off close to mid-night in a more touristy part of the city. A10th device was found unexploded in a

hotel toilet.An eyewitness, Klaudiya Tus, 32, from

Croatia, said: “We were sitting in a restau-rant, we heard a bang and we thought itwas fireworks because it was just aboutmidnight. But then a lady came runningand said ‘It’s a bomb, it’s a bomb, it’s abomb, run’. So we fled. It was very scary,everyone was jumping on top of eachother, then we saw people with blood ontheir faces running out.”

An investigation was launched, but thenational deputy police chief, General Aji-rawit Suphanaphesat, said separatistinsurgents were probably not behind theattacks. Apirak Kosayothin, Bangkok’smayor, expressed shock at the extent ofthe attacks and cancelled the city’s twobig public New Year’s Eve countdown cel-ebrations and other smaller ones.

A receptionist at the Saxophone barnear the Victory Monument, another tar-get of the bombings said: “I heard a loudexplosion and I thought it was fireworks.I ran there and saw a bleeding woman at

the bus stop,” said Somrak Manphothong.Police cordoned off bus stops in the area.

At a vegetable market in the Klong Toeyslum, where another bomb had exploded,a pool of blood and egg yolks covered theroadside next to an overturned motor-cycle. Hotels stepped up security, search-ing cars on their premises, and somecancelled their expensive New Year’s Evedinners.

A big public celebration was also calledoff in the northern city of Chiang Mai. “Itis not worth risking,” said Major GeneralBandop Sukhonthaman, the provincialpolice chief.

Police and soldiers with assault riflesguarded some entertainment venues,subway and light railway stations andbusy roundabouts. Roadblocks wereerected on some streets.

The nationals of several embassies wereadvised through websites to avoidBangkok’s city centre, with the Britishembassy urging Britons “not to travel into

the city until further notice”. But oneBriton ,Keith Waters, said: “No, I’m notscared. I’m from England. There are bombscares all the time.” He neverthelessexpressed disappointment since he hadbeen looking forward to ringing in his firstnew year with his Thai wife.

Bangkok has been largely insulatedfrom the violence in southern Thailandthat has claimed 1,200 lives in the pastthree years. But several small explosiveswere set off during recent political turmoilin an apparent attempt to create a senseof instability, not to cause casualties.

Mr Thaksin still has widespread sup-port, and a number of arson attacks inprovincial areas have been blamed on hisfollowers.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political sci-entist at Chulalongkorn University, said:“There are two suspects: Muslim insur-gents and Thaksin’s residual power. I tendto think it’s residual power. I suspect theprevious regime. The coup was not doneright. If there had to be a coup, they hadto put away Thaksin and his cronies.”

Britons among thosewounded in blasts

Motive unclear as policeimpose security lockdown

Thailand’s primeminister GeneralSurayudChulanont visitingpeople injured inthe series of bombblasts yesterday

Thai bomb experts inspect the scene of one of the bomb blasts at a bus stop nearthe Victory Monument in central Bangkok Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA

Rallies across Spain condemn violence afterairport bombing by Eta leaves two missing

Dale Fuchs Madrid

Thousands of people demonstrated incities across Spain yesterday as rescuerssearched for two people missing after theBasque separatist group Eta exploded a500kg bomb at Madrid airport, ending anine-month-old ceasefire.

“Eta has chosen the worst path, whichonly has one end — jail,” said the govern-ing Socialist party spokesman, JoséBlanco, after a moment of silence inMadrid’s Puerta del Sol. “Events likeyesterday show yet again that all Etawants to do is kill,” Francisco José Alcaraz,president of an association of victims ofEta violence, told Associated Press.

Spain’s prime minister, José LuisRodríguez Zapatero, called off talks withEta following Saturday’s attack in the carpark of the airport’s new terminal, endingthe ceasefire that had stirred hopes of apeaceful solution to the Basque separat-ist conflict, in which Eta has claimedresponsibility for taking 800 or so livesover the years.

“Today’s step is the most mistaken anduseless that the terrorists could take,” MrZapatero said at a press conference. How-ever, his ambiguous words were inter-preted by many observers to mean thedoor had not been shut completely onnegotiations.

Two people were reported missing andabout 20 others were injured in the blastat 9am, which destroyed five stories of the

carpark and caused chaos at the airport,which was filled with thousands of NewYear travellers. Passengers were evacu-ated after Eta gave three warning calls in-dicating the bomb’s location and timing.

Arnaldo Otegi, leader of Eta’s politicalarm, the banned party Batasuna, blamedthe return to violence on the govern-ment’s failure to make a single gesture ofgood faith, such as moving jailed Etamembers, now dispersed throughout thecountry, to Basque prisons. “There has not

been one gesture from the government,”Mr Otegi said. He added that “Zapateroeven bragged that he conceded less thanAznar”, referring to the failed peace talkin 1998 under the then conservative primeminister, José María Aznar.

An editorial in La Vanguardia yesterdayaccused Batasuna of ensuring failure ofthe process by refusing to renounce vio-lence: “What Otgei and his partnersshould know is that the only obstacle topeace for the last nine months is, prec-isely, its refusal to condemn violence as acondition for talks with the government.”

Mr Zapatero had expressed optimismabout the peace process despite escalat-ing street violence and mounting warn-ings from Eta and sympathisers that neg-otiations were floundering. In his year-end address on Friday he even predictedprogess. “In one year we will be betterthan today,” he said.

But last week police discovered a stashof weapons, and in October Eta memberswere accused of stealing 350 pistols, a signthat the group was rearming.

After the bombing, the conservativeopposition leader, Mariano Rajoy, re-peated calls to end the “ill-named peaceprocess” with the Eta “assassins”. Heaccused Eta of using the ceasefire as a ployto reorganise, with hundreds of its mem-bers in jail and its financial network crip-pled. The only solution to the conflict, MrRajoy argued, was police action.

guardian.co.uk/spain ≥Protesters in Madrid after Eta’s attack

Spaniard, 67, becomes oldestnew mother with birth of twins

Dale Fuchs Madrid

A 67-year-old woman who gave birth totwins in a Barcelona hospital at the week-end, becoming the oldest new mother inthe world, is expected to leave hospital inthe next couple of days after the normalrecuperation time for a caesarean birth, ahospital spokesman said yesterday.

The woman and her sons are in goodhealth after a smooth delivery, said aspokeswoman for the Sant Pau hospital.

The hospital would not reveal thewoman’s name or other personal infor-mation, but the newspaper La Vanguardiayesterday said that she had had in-vitrofertilisation treatment in the US. Otherreports said she had received the treat-ment in Latin America.

The twins were placed in an incubator,the newspaper added.

The woman, who comes from And-alucía, had been pregnant for the firsttime. She gave birth at the Barcelona cen-tre because it specialises in high-riskdeliveries, a term that usually refers topregnant teenagers, or women who suf-fer an illness, the hospital spokeswomantold the Guardian. She is expected to bedischarged tomorrow or Wednesday.

The oldest woman in Britain to havehad a baby is Patricia Rashbrook, a 63-year-old child psychiatrist, who gave birthto a 6lb 10oz boy this summer afterreceiving in-vitro treatments in easternEurope. That pregnancy provoked criti-

cism from groups who said she was tooold to raise a child.

A retired university professor in Roma-nia, Adriana Iliescu, gave birth to a daugh-ter at the age of 66, in 2006. She wasthought to be the world’s oldest motheruntil this weekend’s arrival. In 2003, ateacher in India had a baby boy at the ageof 65.

Clinics in the UK and many other coun-tries will not help women conceive aftera certain age in the belief that it is unfair tothe child. But many people argue that menand women are living longer and remainmore physically fit than people of previ-ous generations.

Some women hide their age to qualifyfor fertility help. To get treatment, a 60-year-old British woman, who gave birthto a son in 1997, told a UK fertility clinicshe was 49. Many couples solve the prob-lem by going to countries where the rulesare less strict, a practice now known as“fertility tourism”. British authoritieshave warned couples that some clinicsabroad allow practices banned in the UK,such as implanting five embryos at once.

The mature mothers join other contro-versies over reproductive techniques,such as the selection of embryos to save asibling who is ill. The Spanish governmentpassed a law this spring to allow the tech-nique in extreme cases, and the first threefamilies were recently given approval tostart treatments.

guardian.co.uk/spain ≥

Paul Hewitt, 55, a retired airline employee from West Sussex, wasone of two Britons injured in thebombings. He told the Guardian howthe last few minutes of 2006 werethe most eventful of his year

“I was at a party at the AmariWatergate hotel and had left andwas trying to hail a taxi when almost exactly as the clock struck new yearthere was an explosion on the otherside of the road.

“It all happened so suddenly;there was a huge flash and then Isaw blood pouring out of my arm.Funnily enough, I didn’t feel any-thing. The police told me the bombmay have been in a telephone kioskor a car, but they are not sure. Thehospital are looking after me well.They have found a piece of shrapnelin my left arm.

“I arrived here in November, a fewmonths after retiring. I came here toenjoy life and on January 3 I wasgoing to go to Krabi and then laterAustralia, but I’m not sure now.

“I feel very anxious and apprehen-sive. I’m not sure what’s going on inBangkok. I have always consideredThailand to be one of the safestcountries, but I was in the wrongplace at the wrong time.

“Let’s just say it was a bad end tolast year and I’m hoping for a betterstart to the new one.”Jonathan Watts

Eyewitness

‘I feel veryanxious andapprehensive’

International


Italy puts froth back into cappuccino

France

2006 was deadly year forjournalists, says watchdog

At least 81 reporters were killed in 2006,the most for more than a decade, with Iraqagain the deadliest place, the mediawatchdog Reporters without Borders saidyesterday. In its annual report, the Paris-based group said 32 media assistants werealso killed, at least 871 reporters arrestedand at least 1,472 attacks or threats againstthe media registered around the world —a new record. It was the worst year forjournalists since 1994, the year of theRwandan genocide. For the fourth yearrunning, Iraq claimed the highest numberof deaths, with 39 journalists and 25 med-ia assistants killed there. Reuters Paris

Indonesia

Ferry survivors found but hundreds missing

Rescuers have found nearly 180 survivorsfrom the ferry which sank in the Java sealast week, and say there is hope of dozensmore — after life rafts were spotted withpeople in them. However, hundreds arestill missing after the capsize around mid-night on Friday. Helicopter crews droppedfood and water to a group of 30 survivorsdrifting in lifeboats after heavy wavesprevented rescuers getting close, saidHatta Radjasa, the transport minister. The2,178-tonne ship, reported to be carrying628 people and crew, was heading fromKalimantan, Borneo, to Semarang, Java.Reuters Rembang

United States

Celebrity nicknames thatshould be cut from a list

It would be “awesome” if “TomKat” (TomCruise and Katie Holmes) and other nick-names for celebrity couples “went miss-ing” in the new year, according to Lake Su-perior State University’s 32nd annual Listof Words Banished from the Queen’s Eng-lish for Mis-Use, Over-Use and GeneralUselessness. How would “Lardy” havesounded for Laurel and Hardy, or “Bog-Call” for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Ba-call? the list’s compilers asked. Theuniversity chose its 16 cliches from 4,500submissions. Many wanted a stop to theonslaught of “awesome”, and banishmentof “gone missing”. Reuters Chicago

Cuba

Castro denies US claimsthat his health is failing

Fidel Castro has rebutted American claimsabout his health failing, saying hisrecovery was far from being a “lost battle”.In his traditional new year’s address, com-memorating the 1959 revolution on the is-land, the 80-year-old Cuban leader (pic-tured in October) said in a statement readby a radio newsreader that he was grate-ful for the people’s “affection and sup-port”. He added: “Regarding my recovery,I have always warned that it could be aprolonged process, but it is far from beinga lost battle. I collaborate as a disciplinedpatient, attended by the devoted team ofdoctors.” Duncan Campbell

Tom Kington Rome

In a fightback against the global spreadof super-sized frappuccinos and icedcappuccinos, Italy has certified what itconsiders the classic cappuccino.

In a snub to the Starbucks-drivencraze for loading gallons of hot frothycoffee-flavoured liquid into cardboardpots, Italy’s National Institute for ItalianEspresso is defending the traditionalsquirt of steamed milk over a shot ofespresso that is knocked back by mil-lions of Italians every morning at zinc-topped bars up and down the country.

The newly certified milky coffee,weighing in at only 150 ml and served ina ceramic cup, was offered to MPs andministers at a Christmas event spon-sored by the Italian parliamentary cul-ture commission.

The institute has already given a gov-ernment-backed certification to the per-fect espresso coffee and yesterday theorganisation’s president, Marco Paladini,

Patients die asSicilian mafiabuys into thehospital service

Tom Kington Rome

A wave of deaths in Sicilian hospitals hashighlighted a crisis in the island’s healthservice, linked by a senior politician to thedraining of public funds by the mafia.

Three suspicious deaths of patients inthree days over Christmas have raisedalarm. A 78-year-old woman died of aheart attack in a Palermo emergency wardon December 28 after waiting four hoursto be seen. The ward has no triage, or sys-tem for prioritising patients.

Earlier, a pregnant woman delivered astillborn child after doctors declined tocarry out a caesarean section, while theparents of a newborn son who died in hos-pital have accused doctors of malpractice.

“Cosa Nostra is investing heavily in pri-vate health centres in Sicily which are sub-sidised by the state,” said Francesco For-gione, the head of Italy’s parliamentaryanti-mafia commission.

After drug trafficking, the control ofpublic and private contracting is the sec-ond most lucrative activity for organisedcrime in Italy, amounting to a turnover ofabout €17.5bn (£11.8bn), of which theSicilian mafia is responsible for €6.5bn.

Sicily has about 1,800 private healthcentres compared with 150 in the richnorthern region of Lombardy, said Mr For-gione. Such clinics offer government-sub-sidised services in order to reduce theworkload for public hospitals. “But thathas diverted funds from public hospitals,which are falling into a state of disrepair,”he said. “Sicily is the first region in Italy

for the financing of private health centresand the first for patient deaths.”

Mr Forgione, who was appointed tohead the anti-mafia commission by thecentre-left government of Romano Prodi,has said that investigating mafia penetra-tion of the health business will be a prior-ity in Sicily and Calabria. In 2005Francesco Fortugno, number two in theregional assembly, was murdered bythe ’Ndrangheta crime syndicate whileinvestigating the awarding of hospitalcontracts.

In Sicily, the mafia is not only investingin private clinics but is also involved insteering public health contracts towardsfriendly companies, said Mr Forgione.“During the hunt for mafia boss BernardoProvenzano it was even discovered thatsome Palermo neighbourhood bosseswere themselves doctors or lawyers, partof a new mafia bourgeoisie.”

Giuseppe Guttadauro, the jailed boss ofPalermo’s Brancaccio district, was a highprofile surgeon. Police listened in as Gut-tadauro discussed political appointmentswith the city’s public health assessorDomenico Miceli, himself a doctor. Miceliwas in turn sentenced to eight years formafia association in December.

As the Sicilian mafia moves into low keybusinesses like healthcare, a more tradi-tional Cosa Nostra calling card has how-ever recently resurfaced in Sicily. A sev-ered goat’s head was delivered to RinoFoschi, sport director of Palermo footballclub, on December 22, possibly as a protestagainst a clampdown on the free distrib-ution of tickets to games. The city’s cul-tural assessor also received a goat’s head.

Italians are very proud of their tradi-tional coffee, and even have a National Institute for ItalianEspresso. Use the following recipe to make your own perfectcup.

Ingredients125ml milk, no warmer than 3-5C,containing a minimum of 3.2%protein and 3.5% fat25ml shot of hot espresso coffee

DirectionsAdd coffee to a 150-160ml capacityceramic cupFroth milk with steam to atemperature of 55C, and add to cupAdd sugar and stir gently

Cup winnerstood up for the beleaguered cappuc-cino, promising “to protect this impor-tant expression of our national gastro-nomic culture... A great success abroad,but not always made with adequate sen-sory quality”, the newspaper Il Giornalequoted him as saying.

More froth than liquid, the Italiancappuccino can be swallowed in sec-onds, and according to purists shouldleave a smear of milk on the inside of thecup. Stirring the beverage to mix themilk with the coffee that lurks in thebottom should not produce an overallbrown colour, but streaks of coffee inthe pure white foam. A white moustacheis de rigueur after drinking.

According to many Italians, the lightbrown colour is similar to that of therobes worn by Italy’s Capuchin monks,hence the name, while others credit Ca-puchin monk Marco D’Aviano with theinvention of the drink, after he discov-ered a sack of coffee captured from theOttomans during the battle of Vienna in1683. D’Aviano was beatified in 2003 for

his missionary work and miraculouspower of healing.

There is no debate over when a cap-puccino is drunk. Italians line up everymorning in bars before steaming, shinycoffee machines to gulp down their cof-fee, possibly returning for a another cap-puccino after a late night. One allowedvariant is the caffelatte, usually servedin a tall glass, with extra milk added.

Only tourists take a cappuccino orcaffelatte after lunch, as Italians believethe milk plays havoc with digestion.

Nescafé may be making inroads inItaly through advertising of its instantgranules, but Starbucks and other globalcoffee chains have yet to set foot in thebel paese. And if they did, they mightfind their margins shrinking. An averagecappuccino, drunk standing up at a barin Rome, costs around 78 pence, anespresso 47 pence — although pricesmay rise by 100% if the drinker takes aseat and waits to be served.

guardian.co.uk/italy ≥

The Mafia’sturnover in publicand privatecontracting inSicily alone. In thewhole of Italy thefigure is €17.5bn

€6.5bn

Italians are trying to preserve the perfect cappuccino, an important part of the country’s ‘national gastronomic culture’ Photograph: Matthew Klein/Corbis

Mugabe attempts to close last remaining newspaper opponents

Andrew Meldrum Johannesburg

Robert Mugabe’s government has movedto close Zimbabwe’s remaining indepen-dent press by stripping newspaper ownerTrevor Ncube of his citizenship.

The action against the publisher comesas Mr Mugabe, 82 and president for 26years, pushes for an extension to his termof office by a further two years. Frustratedby unprecedented resistance from withinhis Zanu-PF party, he appears to be tryingto silence all of his critics.

Yesterday an outspoken opponent,Lovemore Madhuku, accused the police

of failing to investigate a fire at his home,which he said was arson. “It is very clearthat the government is trying to silenceall critical voices, including Trevor Ncubeand his newspapers, and me. We are allopposed to Mugabe’s attempts to extendhis rule to 2010,” said Madhuku, a lawlecturer at the University of Zimbabwe.

Senior government officials saidMr Ncube, the publisher of two weeklies,the Zimbabwe Independent and the Stan-dard, was not entitled to Zimbabweancitizenship because his father was Zam-bian.

Zimbabwe’s strict media laws requirenewspapers to be owned by Zimbabwean

citizens. If the Mugabe government suc-ceeds in withdrawing Mr Ncube’scitizenship, it is expected to swiftly closehis two papers, which are staunch criticsof Mr Mugabe’s policies.

Mr Ncube told the Guardian yesterdaythat he would go to court to retain hiscitizenship: “I am a Zimbabwean. I wasborn and bred in Zimbabwe and I have noother citizenship.

“I am confident the courts will upholdmy rights,” he said.

Mr Ncube’s father was from Zambia butheld Zimbabwean citizenship by the timehis son was born, according to courtpapers. A year ago the government seized

Mr Ncube’s passport but the courts ord-ered that it be returned to him.

He publishes Zimbabwe’s last remain-ing privately owned newspapers. The gov-ernment has closed down the Daily Newsand three other papers since 2003.

Despite numerous arrests and threatsof violence, the Zimbabwe Independentand the Standard have continued toexpose corruption and human rightsabuses.

Most recently Mr Ncube’s newspaperswere the only publications to reveal thatMr Mugabe’s efforts to extend his ruleuntil 2010 were rejected at the Zanu-PFparty conference in mid-December.


FinancialBusiness editor: Deborah Hargreaves

Telephone: 020-7713 4791

Fax: 020-7833 4456


Belarus avoids cold new year by bowingto Gazprom demand for price increase

Nabi Abdullaev Moscow

Belarus narrowly escaped a winter energycrisis last night after a last-minute deal ongas prices was struck with Russian gasmonopoly Gazprom.

Gazprom had said it would cut offsupplies to Belarus, also threatening fuelsupplies to European countries served bythe Belarus pipeline, if a deal was notreached by midnight last night.

The five-year contract will requireBelarus to pay $100 per 1,000 cubicmetres, a steep rise on the previous tariffof $45, but a reduction from the $105 thatGazprom had demanded. The agreementrequires Belarus to pay gradually increas-ing prices after the current contract untilworld market levels are reached by 2011.

“A mid-term agreement was reached ongas prices to Belarus and on transit ship-ments to Europe,” Gazprom boss AlexeiMiller told a press briefing at the Russiangas monopoly's headquarters.

Gazprom will also be required to buy50% of the shares in Beltransgaz, the Bela-rusian pipeline network. Gazprom hadstipulated that Belarus pay $30 of the newprice in Beltransgaz shares, but under thenew contract Belarus will pay for the gasin cash and Gazprom will buy the pipelineshares in cash.

On Friday, Belarus's president, Alexan-der Lukashenko, vowed that Minsk wouldnot pay more than Russian consumers,saying that the two countries were mem-bers of a customs union.

If no agreement had been reached,Gazprom said it would stop gas suppliesto Belarus at 10am today. Minsk hadthreatened to freeze the transit of Russiangas to Europe through Belarus on thesame day.

Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanovand Alexander Timoshenko, spokesmanfor the Belarus prime minister, had bothcommitted to continue talks right to thedeadline in order to resolve the crisis.

Gazprom is trying to end heavy dis-counts to former Soviet republics andbring gas prices closer to world levels ofabout $230 per 1,000 cubic metres.

Georgia recently agreed to raise theprice it pays, but Azerbaijan is looking tobuy Iranian gas instead.

Mr Kupriyanov also stressed that theYamal-Europe transit gas pipeline whichruns across Belarus was the property ofGazprom, and that Minsk was obliged toallow unhindered transit of gas to west-ern Europe.

Two-thirds of the 45bn cubic metres ofgas that Gazprom sold to Europe last yearwas pumped via Belarus through theYamal-Europe pipeline.

Some 20% of Russian gas exports toEurope — mainly to Poland, Lithuania andGermany — passes through Belarus. Theother 80% flows through Ukraine. Aboutone-quarter of natural gas consumed inEurope comes from Russia.

Last year, in a similar dispute, Russiabriefly shut off gas supplies to Ukraine,which led to supply disruptions to Italy,Austria and Hungary — for the first timesince the 1980s when the Soviet Union firstsigned major contracts with European gov-ernments. That episode undermined Rus-sia's reputation as a reliable supplier.

In November, Richard Lugar, head of theUS Senate's foreign relations committee,described Russia's energy policies regard-ing former Soviet republics and easternEuropean countries as “geo-strategicblackmail”.

Meanwhile, Belarus has reportedlybeen stockpiling oil and coal in recentweeks, which would have allowed itspower plants to run without Russian gasfor a while.

“We will live in dug-outs but we will notsurrender to blackmail," Mr Lukashenkosaid on Friday.

Although the price demanded byGazprom is well below world marketprices for natural gas, it still is likely to bea tough blow to Belarus.

The country retains a mostly cen-tralised, Soviet-style economy, and its in-dustries depend on cheap Russian gas tobe competitive.

Eleventh-hour agreementaverts gas switch-off

Russia’s tough line addsto Europe’s energy worries

Stocking up on firewood in the Belarus village of Kopeinoye, south-east of the capital of Minsk Photograph: Sergei Grits/AP

European bank could scrap loan

Marianne Barriaux

The European Bank for Reconstructionand Development may pull out of theSakhalin-2 liquefied gas project in Russiain a further blow to a scheme alreadymired in controversy.

The bank, which invests in countriesfrom central Europe to central Asia withthe aim of building up market economies,had been in discussions with sharehold-ers Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi about pro-viding a $300m (£150m) loan for the $20bnproject, with a further $300m comingfrom a loan syndicated to other financialinstitutions.

But Gazprom, the Russian state-ownedenergy giant, wrested control of the pro-ject less than two weeks ago when itnegotiated a stake of 50% plus one sharein the Sakhalin Energy Investment Com-pany, forcing the other three groups tohalve their own interests.

A spokesman for the EBRD said: “Newdevelopments make things more difficult,and, one could say, may make the bankless needed for the project.” He insistedthat a final decision had not been reached.

The bank prefers to finance projects inthe private sector, but Gazprom’s con-trolling stake effectively means thescheme now has a majority state interestsince Gazprom is controlled by the Russ-ian government. A spokesman for Shellrefused to comment on the specifics, say-ing: “Gazprom is a valuable partner to theproject and we will now determine thenext steps and engage with lenders.”

The controversial deal with Gazprom,announced on December 21, came afterRussian environmental regulatorscriticised the project in eastern Siberia.They threatened to stop the scheme andimpose fines of up to $30bn on Shell andits two Japanese partners. The allegationswere denied by Shell, which describedsome of them as “unsubstantiated attackscontaining exaggerations and distor-tions”. After Gazprom finally took controlof the project, the Russian president,Vladimir Putin, said the environmentalconcerns had been settled.

The EBRD’s planned loan is relativelysmall compared to the overall cost of theproject. But its support is important froman environmental perspective, as it hasstudied the impact of the scheme.

Tesco’s £80mprice cuts putnew pressureon rivals

David Teather

Britain’s biggest supermarket chain,Tesco, is further turning the screws on itsrivals by triggering a price war.

It is permanently cutting prices on 600key items by a total of £80m. The movewill be viewed by critics as anotherexample of how the increasingly domi-nant retailer is flexing its muscles againstsmaller competitors.

A report published yesterday appearedto underline its strength, suggesting thatthe grocer took up half of all the new shop-ping space in Britain last year. The data,collected by Verdict Research, said Tescoopened 2m sq ft, more than the entireBluewater shopping centre in Kent.

It currently has around 21.6% of thegrocery market in Britain, according to re-search firm Planet Retail, followed bySainsbury with 11.8% and Asda at 10.1%.

Tesco is cutting up to 30% off the priceof a range of everyday items includingketchup, tea bags and fruit juices, as wellas more than 100 health and beautyproducts.

In addition to the more long-term cuts,it will be pushing more than 100 half-pricepromotions within its stores.

It is a move that is likely to refocus theminds of rivals on price, after a year inwhich the chains were battling it out ongreen credentials and quality. However,few retail analysts expect any slowing inthe trend towards sales of organic andhigher-quality food products amongBritain’s middle classes.

Sainsbury is in the midst of a pro-gramme of cutting £400m from prices tomake it more competitive — regular sur-veys in The Grocer magazine showedTesco was significantly cheaper on a bas-ket of items. It appeared to be paying offwith profits heading back up. In Novem-ber, it reported like-for-like sales wereahead by 6.2%.

The Tesco cuts come ahead of publica-tion of the anxiously awaited initial find-ings from a Competition Commission in-quiry into the grocery sector. The Officeof Fair Trading referred the inquiry to thecommission in the summer, and the earlyfindings are due to be published thismonth.

In its submission, Sainsbury warnedthat Tesco could have up to 43% of thegrocery market within four years if thewatchdog failed to take action to curtailits growth.

At the time, Sainsbury said that Tescohad more than half of all the sites thatwere being developed into grocery out-lets. Sainsbury, Waitrose, Morrisons andAsda want changes to the planning regimeto allow them to compete more effec-tively.

In October, Tesco chalked up half-yearprofits of more than £1bn — only four yearsafter first breaching the £1bn level for afull year.

Property companies rush to become savings trusts

Phillip Inman and Tony Levene

Britain’s biggest commercial propertyowners will today ditch their corporatestatus and turn themselves into invest-ment trusts.

British Land, Land Securities, BrixtonEstates and a dozen other firms willbecome real estate investment trusts, orReits, following a change in the lawallowing them to own property and dis-tribute the gains tax-free.

Within months, hundreds of the new-style property trusts are expected to be upand running with the result that much ofBritain’s commercial property, and even-tually residential as well, will be held invehicles that avoid corporation tax andcapital gains tax.

The end of this “double taxation” willallow dividends to be paid out of untaxedincome from the coming year provided atleast 90% is distributed to investors.

To convert to a trust companies mustpay a one-off charge to the Treasuryequivalent to 2% of the value of theirproperty portfolio. In British Land’s casethe fee would equal one year’s corpora-tion tax bill, about £300m. After that it willbe free to expand its portfolio with littlehindrance from the tax authorities. Thechanges are expected to attract newinvestors. One study reported that 44% of

financial advisers planned to add Reits totheir clients’ investment portfolios.

But many experts are sceptical. JanetMeasom at Morley, Norwich Union’sinvestment arm said: “Commercial prop-erty can’t continue to perform as it hasdone over the past five or so years. It hasgot to come down to earth”. The 15-year-old Norwich Property Trust hit £3bn in Au-gust, with over £1bn coming in over thepast 12 months alone. In the run-up to theintroduction of Reits property shares havemade huge gains with sector leaders suchas Land Securities and British Land risingby around 50% since last winter.

The new Reits are also expected toattract investors in residential property.The rules for holding residential propertywithin the new trusts are complicated, butstill likely to prove enticing to investors.

Francis Salway, chief executive of LandSecurities, said Reits will prove moreattractive than buy-to-let.

While buy-to-let has had a strong run,he pointed out that short tenancies can,if there is a sudden excess, leave investorswith unoccupied properties for lengthyperiods with no rental income.

Land Securities has average unexpiredlease terms of around 10 years and noproperty is worth more than 4% of thetotal portfolio value. “So, in terms of risk,we offer significant diversification bene-fits,” he argues.

What is a Reit?It’s a new type of company thatallows investment in commercial orresidential property to produce tax-efficient rental income. Ninety percent of this income must be distrib-uted to shareholders of the UK-Reitand, in return, the company isexempt from corporation tax andcapital gains on property sales.

Who can invest in a Reit?Anyone can buy shares in a Reit,much like a unit trust.

Why invest in a Reit?Stephen Herring of accountants BDOStoy Hayward says not only can theReit avoid paying corporation tax andcapital gains, but the investor canalso avoid paying tax on their divi-dend income if their shares are held,say, in an ISA or a self invested per-sonal pension (SIPP).

Any potential pitfalls?Some experts argue the propertymarket is nudging its peak so invest-ing now might prove to be a mistake,despite the attractive tax breaks.

FAQ Reits

Thieves target power stations forlorry-loads of precious copper

Terry Macalister

Booming copper prices have triggered aseries of break-ins at power stationsaround the country forcing electricityproviders to increase security at local sub-stations and cut off power during repairs.

Thieves have cost the industry £5m thisyear by stealing the metal, used for earth-ing high-voltage equipment, according tothe Energy Networks Association.

“This is not only very costly to thepower companies and the wider commu-nity but it is very dangerous. Two peoplehave already been killed this year and oth-ers badly injured trying to steal copper,”said Neil Grant, a spokesman for theassociation.

The number of incidents rose dramati-cally in 2006 after much publicised in-creases in the value of copper andprecious metals, Mr Grant said. “We donot like to give much publicity to this forfear it will just encourage others but in themain these break-ins are being perpe-trated by organised gangs using lorries andother equipment.”

Repairing substations that have beenbroken into often involves the operatorhaving to cut off power to homes and po-

tentially to doctors’ surgeries and emer-gency services. Electricity companies areintroducing stricter monitoring systemsand experimenting with water-based ad-hesives which can be sprayed over facili-ties. These leave a print on hands, clothesand anything else that comes into contactwith the copper, making it easier to tracethe thieves and the stolen metal.

E.ON, the group that owns Powergen,confirmed that it was one of the manycompanies that have been hit by this kindof crime, most recently in Dudley, in themidlands. The company said thefts andattempted thefts of copper had trebled.

“We are working with Crime Stoppersand local police forces to try to get themessage over to the local community thatthis is very damaging to customers andpotentially fatal for those breaking in,”said an E.ON spokeswoman.

E.ON has been checking its huge net-work of substations around the countryto ensure they are as secure as they canbe. The railway industry has also beenplagued by thieves looking for copper.

The price of copper has risen fivefoldsince 2001 to around $6,700 (£3,420) atonne with rising demand from theindustrialisation in China and strongdemand elsewhere in Asia.

Sakhalin


Economics

Ashley Seager

If you don’tremember the1960s, this yearmay help you

The world economy lookslike continuing a boom thatequals the postwar heyday

5.5

5

4.5

4

3.5

3

World economy

Growth to steam ahead...Annual % change, GDP

SOURCE: IMF

...and become better balanced Annual % change, GDP

2002 03 04 05 06 07 08 Eurozone

China Japan USUK

2006

Forecast

2007

2.7 2.7 2.4 2

10 10

2.72.1

3.42.9

The world economy, including Britain’s,looks set for another year of robustgrowth. There are plenty of reasons tobe optimistic that the impressive perfor-mance of the past few years, since theworld emerged from the mess of thedotcom bust, will continue uninter-rupted this year and possibly for the restof the decade.

Having grown by an average of morethan 3% a year so far this decade, thenoughties look set to be the world econ-omy’s best decade on record, eclipsingeven the golden years of the 1950s and1960s.

There are risks of course. Doomsayerscontinue to warn of a slump in the dol-lar, a renewed surge in the oil price or acollapse in the US housing market thatcould throw the world off course. Theyare right that the risks exist, but theworld economy has proved its resilienceadmirably in recent years.

Who would have thought, for exam-ple, that the tripling of oil prices in thepast three years would fail to tip theworld into a recession combined withsoaring inflation? In those three yearsthe world economy has grown by almost5% annually — the fastest for more than30 years. World stock markets arebooming as investors show theirconfidence.

MotoringThe main reason for optimism is thatgrowth has broadened out from relyingon the good old American consumerwho, boosted by the ultra-cheap moneyand rising house prices of recent years,kept the world economy motoring whileregions such as the eurozone and Japanwere sluggish.

Now both of those regions, along withChina and India and other emergingeconomies, are performing well. Theyshould be able to withstand the slightslowdown that many analysts areexpecting in the United States. In short,the world is rebalancing.

The US economy, still by far thelargest in the world, looks certain toslow this year. Its housing marketslipped last year and the house priceboom of recent years is a distant mem-ory. Housebuilding has slumped, pricesare down everywhere and a lot of newlybuilt homes are standing empty. But

Britain joins international efforts to give a ‘kiss of life’ to stalled Doha trade talks

Larry Elliott Economics editor

A flurry of diplomatic activity from Wash-ington to New Delhi and on to the alpineski resort of Davos will mark the firstmonth of the new year as one finalattempt is made to provide a kiss of life tothe failing Doha trade talks.

Amid concern that only three monthsare left to save the package of liberalisa-tion measures, pressure will be put on themain protagonists — the United States, theEuropean Union and India — to settle theirdifferences.

Downing Street sources said Britain hasnot given up hopes of a deal, despite the

breakdown in the World Trade Organisa-tion talks last July. Tony Blair has beenurging George Bush, Angela Merkel, theGerman chancellor, and President Lula ofBrazil to give a political push to the neg-otiations, and two senior cabinet minis-ters — the chancellor, Gordon Brown, andthe trade and industry secretary, AlistairDarling — will visit India later this month.

Trade ministers from around 20 coun-tries will then hold talks at the annualmeeting of the World Economic Forum inDavos in late July, although trade expertsbelieve a more significant event will be theswearing in next month of the newDemocrat-dominated Congress in the US.

The WTO’s director-general, PascalLamy, has called 2007 a “defining year”,and in Geneva it is recognised that thenext few months will be crucial both forthe Doha round and for the credibility ofthe WTO. No trade round has failed sincethe protectionist decade of the 1930s.

With 2008 seen as a write-off becauseof the US presidential election, the WTOsays that if there is no deal in 2007 it willbe mid-2009 before negotiations can

resume. The talks involve plans for freertrade in agriculture, tariff cuts in manu-facturing and the opening up of globaltrade in services.

President Bush now has a number ofimportant decisions to make, Mr Lamybelieves. Firstly, he has to decide whetherhe is serious about a global deal or not; ifso he has to make bigger cuts in subsidiesto US farmers than currently offered.

Secondly, he has to face down demandsfor a new farm bill when the current pack-age of support runs out this year. WTOsources said a new farm bill would spellthe end of the Doha round.

Finally, Mr Bush has to avoid partisanwarfare in Washington between a Repub-lican White House and a Democratic

Congress. Mr Bush will lose the ability tofast-track a trade bill through Congressunder his Trade Promotion Authorityunless legislation is tabled by the end ofMarch. That, however, would requirenegotiators to show a degree of urgencylacking since the talks were started in theQatari capital in November 2001.

Peter Mandelson, Europe’s trade com-missioner, believes that the way to un-block the round would be for the US to puta ceiling of $15bn (£7.6bn) on subsidies,compared to current spending of $19bn.

An EU trade source said: “Doha is notdead: definitely. There is a very narrowwindow to pull it off, and the politics aredifficult. But some of the political stars arecoming into alignment.”

other parts of the US economy appear tohave taken up the slack.

Exports are healthy, thanks to astrong world economy and a weaker dol-lar; business investment and non-residential construction are also doingwell. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development expects USgrowth to slow to 2.4% this year, from3.3% in 2006. It expects a sluggish firsthalf of the year before a rebound later inthe year. It does not predict a US reces-sion, nor does the International Mon-etary Fund, which is forecasting growthof close to 3% for the US this year.

FrothyIndeed, the Federal Reserve, whichraised interest rates from their low pointof 1% in 2004 to 5.25% last August in anattempt to rein in the frothy housingmarket and keep inflation in check, stillthinks high inflation is more of a dangerthan slow growth. Last week, news fromthe US showed sales of homes hadbegun to rise again and stocks of unsoldhomes had started falling.

If the housing market recovers, the USeconomy could even return to surpris-ingly robust growth in 2007. The Fedlooks likely to keep interest rates onhold for the foreseeable future, but ithas room to cut them if the economylooks weak.

The eurozone, long the sick man ofthe world economy, turned in a surpris-ingly respectable performance in 2006,growing by around 2.6%, well above2005’s rate of 1.4%. The OECD and IMFexpect growth to be closer to 2% thisyear and next, partly because the Euro-pean Central Bank has made it clear itintends to continue raising interest ratesfrom their current 3.5%. That growthrate may sound paltry, but it is decent bythe standards of recent years.

Germany has been the particular starin Europe, as its companies haveresponded to the strong world economyby raising exports, although questionsremain about the strength of domesticdemand. Wage growth has been sluggishas firms have used the threat of movingproduction abroad to keep pay rises to aminimum. A rise in VAT today from 16%to 19% is not going to help consumerspending, but is unlikely to derail theeconomy.

Spain and Italy look a little lesssecure, with the former experiencing aproperty market bubble which looksvulnerable to a burst while the latter issuffering from a lack of competitivenessand high inflation. There are also somequestion marks over the strength of theFrench economy.

Few such doubts exist over China. Itseconomy is likely to grow by 10% againthis year, as it has done for many years,taking it to number four in the worldeconomy ranking. It is now big enough to make its growth matter for the wholeworld. Taken together, emergingmarkets including India, Russia andBrazil now account for 70% of worldgrowth. They accounted for 50% a

decade ago. The world is much lessdependent on the US than it used to be.

Japan, still the world’s second largesteconomy, seems to be recoveringsteadily from its decade-long slumpalthough there are still concerns aboutwhether its deflation problem has beensolved in spite of rock-bottom interestrates of just 0.25%.

Which brings us to Britain, the world’sfifth largest economy. Here, too, thingslook solid. Growth was better thanexpected last year, at around 2.6%, and

the economy looks to have powered intothe new year in rude health. The Bank ofEngland, which raised interest ratestwice last year to their current 5%, mayeven be tempted to nudge them upagain, although I am not convinced itwill have to.

The year here is likely to be domi-nated by the rise and rise of houseprices, particularly in London and thesouth-east. At some point the greatnoughties housing boom will have toend. Another interest rate rise or two

might just be enough to do that, givenhow indebted the average Briton hasbecome. That could turn out to be thenasty surprise of this year.

There will also be the small matter ofa change of the guard at the Treasury, asGordon Brown looks set to move toNumber 10 in the first half of the year.His March budget is likely to be his swansong after a decade aschancellor.

All in all, it is a pretty rosy scenario forthe world and one which will allow com-pany profits to keep increasing. Themain cloud on the horizon is not the UScurrent account deficit or a potential runon the dollar (it is likely to continue toslide, but not crash) but rather theemerging crisis surrounding Iran.

If the country’s bellicose leadershipcontinues to defy the United Nationswith its nuclear programme and re-sponds to sanctions by carrying out itsthreat to shut the Straits of Hormuz andprevent a fifth of the world’s oil gettingto market, the price of crude couldeasily shoot through $100 a barrel andfinally rattle the confidence of worldstock markets.

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Out of the coldEmerging economies such as Chinanow make up 70% of the world’sgrowth and are forecast to continuepowering world markets once againthrough the coming year Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters

The annualamount that USspends insubsidies. It isamong issues thathave stalled thecurrent trade talks

$19bn

Comment Debate


Don’t overlook the impact of empire on our identity

Aspate of soul search-ing is guaranteed by two major anniversa-ries that loom this year: the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, and the Act of Union

of England and Scotland in 1707. Both will feed into Britain’s nagging sense of self-doubt : who are we? As the debates around integration and multiculturalism show no sign of fl agging, both anniver-saries will be mined for their contempo-rary relevance. Add the imminent arrival of a Scot as prime minister — and one who has invested time and energy into mastering the history of British identity — and the stage is set for intense national introspection. Tele vision pro-grammes, books, cere monies, confer-ences and newspaper supplements have been in the planning for months.

Some might regard this self-referen-tialism as tedious; they might advocate an apology for the slave trade and let’s be done with 2007’s anniversaries. But our reckoning with British history has been so limited that these two anniver-saries provide us with a good opportu-nity for an overdue reality check. Any chance of reinventing a plausible national identity now (as many are keen to do) is only possible if we develop a much better understanding of how our nation behaved in the past and how nationalisms (English, Scottish and British) were elaborately created over the past few hundred years — and how incomplete and fragile that process always was. In how many other coun-tries do children grow up uncertain of what to call their country, or adults hunt through those drop-down menus on the internet, uncertain whether their country is listed as the UK, Great Britain, Britain or England?

The coincidence of these two anniver-saries is fortuitous. The abolition of the slave trade is a painful reminder of Brit-ish imperial history, which we have, incredibly, managed to largely forget. Who remembers the Bengal famine or Hola camp, the empire’s opium trade with China or our invention of concen-tration camps in the Boer war? We too easily overlook how empire was a linch-pin to British national identity, vital to welding Scotland and England together. Indeed, historian Linda Colley suggests three ingredients for British identity: “Great Britain is an invented nation that was not founded on the suppression of older loyalties so much as superimposed on them, and that was heavily depend-ent for its raison d’etre on a broadly Protestant culture, on the treat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with France, and on the triumphs, prof-its and Otherness represented by a mas-sive overseas empire.”

These three props for Britishness have collapsed: Protestant Christianity

There was something curiously cuddly about the man Churchill called “Uncle Joe”. He may have been a blood-drenched tyrant — oblit-erating his own people by the million — but he

also had a jovial way with a vodka bot-tle. He was a joker, a shrewd practical thinker, and a politician other politi-cians held in awe. Without his charisma and grit, indeed, the second world war would have turned out very diff erently. Which brings us to Saddam Hussein.

Saddam has not got much joy from the obituary writers these past couple of days. He is hanged by the neck, and his death brings no mourning. Wrap the corpse in a fl imsy sheet and bury it deep. But there’s a problem to con-front openly here: what the obituaries say today is almost certainly not what they’ll say tomorrow.

Just loo k at the chaos of Iraq as 2007 begins. Does anyone for a second believe that the execution of Saddam will bring calm to the land he ruled? For-get it. The genies of religious and racial hatred are out of the bottle now in a fashion that Saddam never allowed. His follower s killed hundreds of thousands who moved against them. They gassed

has declined sharply, war with France is the pastime only of a few drunken foot-ball fans, and the empire is no more. No wonder Britishness is on the decline; over the past couple of decades, people have become increasingly likely to defi ne themselves in polls as English or Scottish rather than British.

This is the social trend in defi ning identity that politicians such as Gor-don Brown watch closely. Could this re-emergence of the older loyalties to which Colley refers have political consequences? Could the Scottish National party translate that into signifi cant electoral gains in the Scottish elections only a few days after the offi cial commemoration of the Act of Union in May ? It’s not just the Scots who could decide they’ve had enough of the English — the feeling could become mutual. The grumbles are getting louder about Scottish MPs who vote on legislation aff ecting the English and the disproportionate amount of public spending swallowed up by the Scots.

Brown clearly has a vested interest in stilling such complaints. He’s been at the forefront of an establishment attempt to redefi ne Britishness on the grounds of “common values” such as fair play and tolerance. But talking about fair play in May at the anniversary of the Act of Union will look more than a little hollow less than two months after the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in March and its reminder of the savagery of Britain’s imperial record. “Fair play” is one of the fondest of British delusions; it rests on a very partial reading of history.

As Britishness recedes and older loy-

alties such as Englishness re-emerge, this is where the battle now is. Who is going to defi ne Englishness ? Julian Baggini has a stab at it in a book to be published in March, Welcome to Every-town: A Journey into the English Mind. He spent six months living in Rother-ham to get beyond the metropolitan, liberal elite’s perceptions of Englishness — all country cottages, picturesque landscapes and organic lamb joints — and establish what most people (ie the white working class) understand by their Englishness.

Parochial, tightly knit, focused on family and local communities; nostalgic, fearful of the future and insecure; a dogged belief in common sense : these are his conclusions. For Rotherham, the good life is comfort, convenience and familiarity; not the ambitious, stressful striving of the urban middle class so heavily promoted by New Labour. Baggini confesses to feeling that his six months in Rotherham was like visiting a foreign country, and no doubt many of the people he met would regard six months in London as profoundly alienating. How do you weld national identities out of global metropolises disconnected from their hinterland? Englishness is riven with huge regional and class divides . The stakes are high — for example, a rising BNP vote, a fear of asylum, and hostility to Islam. The anni-versary of the Act of Union will provide a stage for all this to be played out. It’s just as painful a commemoration for the English as for the Scottish. It required one nation to lose its sovereignty and the other its identity.

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and they bombed and burnt alive. But they kept their benighted land together, united in glum acquiescence.

Look back on that Iraq in, say, 30 years , and you may have to ask the question that some brave historians ask today about Stalin. Where did the greater evil lie: in suppression or chaos? Nothing can wipe away the memory of what he did. Without him, though, we can also glimpse why he did it . And there, of course, is the shifting context of history — not the instant verdict delivered as a noose jerks tight .

Consider, by contrast, the other big death of the past few days: that of Presi-dent Gerald Ford. No close comparisons possible, of course. But you can refl ect with mild derision on the obituary gush that signalled his passing. Payers of tribute (from White House to leader writing rooms) spoke eloquently of his “wisdom” and “benignity”, hailing a “healer” who helped “bind the wounds of a nation”.

That’s a point of view, to be sure: but surely it also wraps the 38th president in too much panoply. Gerald Ford was an accident that happened when Spiro Agnew fell down a pit of his own digging and Richard Nixon toppled after him. Mr Ford progressed by chance and party decree: a nice, slightly stolid chap who

was no threat to anyone, a country club golfer set down in the Oval Offi ce. And, even with every inherited advantage in town, he couldn’t survive two years later when a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, came to Washington.

Why garland him in such adulation, then ? The reality of his abbreviated term didn’t deserve it . But in America the offi ce makes the man. Ford’s modest achievement was keeping that myth of the offi ce alive — which is why, 30 years hence, he’ll still have his niche, and see the others who came after him bathed in a similarly roseate glow.

What, for instance, will the obitu-arists make of the 43rd president, George Walker Bush? Will he be a “valiant fi ghter for democracy and Rumsfeld prize winner” in the New York Times? A “humble, much undervalued friend of freedom” in the Telegraph? A “favourite son who found God and charted a new course for the 21st century” (the New York Post, or maybe the Sun)? You wouldn’t bet against any of that.

Nor, alas, would you bet against the eventual rehabilitation of Saddam . What goes down in the prison yard has an odd way of coming up again years later .

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The shifting of history

Two anniversaries will feed into our national sense of self-doubt this year, but also off er a chance for a reality check

Madeleine Bunting

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�The abolition of the slave trade is a painful reminder of our history, which we have managed to largely forget

It was symbolic that 2006 ended with a colonial hanging — most of it shown on state television in occupied Iraq. It has been that sort of year in the Arab world. The trial was so blatantly rigged that even Human Rights Watch had to condemn it as a travesty.

Judges were changed on Washington’s orders, defence lawyers were killed and the whole procedure resembled a well orchestrated lynch mob. Where Nuremberg was a relatively dignifi ed application of victor’s justice, Saddam Hussein’s trial was the crudest and most grotesque to date.

The great thinker-president’s refer-ence to it “as a milestone on the road to Iraqi democracy” is as clear an indica-tion as any that Washington pressed the trigger. The leaders of the European Union, supposedly hostile to capital punishment, were passive, as usual.

Although some Shia factions cele-brated in Baghdad, the fi gures published by a fairly independent establishment outfi t, the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, reveal that more than 80% of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before it was occupied. (The ICRSS research is based on detailed house-to-house interview-ing carried out during the third week of November.) Only 5% of those ques-tioned said Iraq is better today than in 2003; 12% felt things had improved and 9% said there was no change. Unsurpris-ingly, 95% felt the security situation was worse than before.

Add to this the fi gures supplied by the United Nations high commissioner for refugees: 1.6 million Iraqis (7% of the population) have fl ed the country since March 2003, and 100,000 leave every month — Christians, doctors, engineers, women. There are 1 million Iraqis in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 150,000 in Cairo. These are refugees who do not excite the sympathy of western public opinion, since the US — EU-backed — occupation is the cause. Perhaps it was these statistics, and estimates of a million Iraqi dead , that necessitated the execution of Saddam .

That Saddam was a tyrant is beyond dispute, but what is conveniently forgotten is that most of his crimes were committed when he was a staunch ally of those who are now occupying the country. It was, as he admitted in one of his trial outbursts, the approval of Washington and the poison gas sup-plied by what was then West Germany that gave him the confi dence to douse Halabja with chemicals in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam deserved a proper trial and punishment in an inde-pendent Iraq. Not this.

The double standards applied by the west never cease to astonish. Indonesia’s Suharto, who presided over a mountain of corpses, was protected by Washington. He never annoyed them as much as Saddam.

And what of those who have created the mess in Iraq today? The torturers of Abu Ghraib; the pitiless butchers of Fal-luja; the ethnic cleansers of Baghdad; the Kurdish prison boss who boasts that his model is Guantánamo. Will Bush and Blair ever be tried for war crimes? Doubtful. And former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar? He is currently employed as a lecturer at Georgetown University, in Washington, where the language of instruction is of course English — of which he hardly speaks a word .

Saddam’s lynching might send a shiver down the spines of the Arab ruling elites. If Saddam can be hanged, so can the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, the Hashemite joker in Amman and the Saudi royals — as long as those who topple them are happy to play ball with the United States.

Tariq Ali is the author of Bush in Babylon:the recolonisation of [email protected]

Conveniently forgotten

Saddam committed most of his crimes when he was an ally of those who now occupy his country

Tariq Ali

Newly deceased leaders have rarely received the obituaries that they deserve

Peter Preston

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Get ready for a gust of optimism on all fronts

Welcome, blus-tery and wild 2007. This is going to be a good year for those of us who still believe in politics. It is

going to be good not because Gordon Brown will alight from his chariot and save the Labour party — though I hope he does — but for bigger reasons . We are going to have a new prime minister, with a workable majority, who knows he can-not thrive by spin or charisma, only suc-cessful policies. He faces an invigorated opposition, tackling the serious issues. It is going to be a year when we turn to Westminster with revived interest.

Maybe it will be better than that. Perhaps we will fi nd some of our rancid cynicism about public life draining away. Brown has fl aws, but he is not cynical and he retains an energetic optimism about the possibility of human improve-ment. David Cameron may be an Old Etonian with posh chums and a weak-ness for glib photo opportunities, but he is also a serious man who has tried to take the Tory party towards mainstream policies on poverty and public services.

Around them are other leaders who are also the reverse of cynical, from the earnest and intelligent Menzies Camp-bell to the rumbustious Scottish nation-alist Alex Salmond. Ministers we can expect to hear a lot of this year include the likes of Ed Balls, David Miliband, Douglas Alexander, Harriet Harman, Jon Cruddas and Hilary Benn — serious-minded, hardworking people who believe in public service ahead of fl ashy self-advancement.

Politicians will face new issues too . Two very diff erent, equally unpleas-ant, new year images should help close a door on the recent past. The fi rst was the hanging of Saddam Hussein: if there are any liberals out there having sec-ond thoughts about bringing back the death penalty, then the grisly, drooling voyeurism of the last moments of that tyrant gives them the reminder they need. The second was the public ritual of Tone and Cherie’s holiday junketing, which is becoming a parody of itself. It

is demeaning having the prime minister taking showbiz freebies .

The bloodsoaked catastrophe of the Iraq invasion will not fade from the front pages and television screens because Saddam is dead. Nor should it: even as British troops begin to return later this year, our debts to that wrecked place are huge. And Blair, that politician of stu-pendous gifts who blew so much of our hope for New Labour when he led Brit-ain into Iraq, will be in offi ce for some months to come. Yet an era is ending.

It is worth remembering that this age of Blair was, for many, also an age of plenty. For the working, home-owning majority, the past decade has been a time of ever greater self-enrichment. On the back of rocketing property prices, low infl ation and easy credit, the British have travelled the world and fi lled their homes with gizmos that would have made Nero or Louis XIV goggle with envy.

The strange thing is, this age of plenty has not produced a happier or more sta-ble country. A YouGov poll, published yesterday, showed a vast gap between people’s assessment of their private position and their beliefs about the country. Whereas 40% said 2006 had been a good year for them personally, and only 24% said it had been a bad one, just 7% thought it had been good for Britain as a whole, and 55% thought it had been bad. Asked if Britain was bet-ter or worse to live in than it had been fi ve years ago, 62% said worse. Asked to give their guess about fi ve years’ time, just 11% thought things would get better, and 53% were pessimists.

These fi gures show the scale of the job facing political leaders . But they also confi rm that riches have not made us more optimistic. People have the new kitchen or the new car, bought on credit, but they look out of the windows and they do not see a fairer, more stable , more secure country. In the old days, at the end of the Thatcher boom, the left said the Tories had created a country of private affl uence and public squalor. Well, after a decade of New Labour, some of that squalor has been dealt with — there have been real improvements in schools, hospitals and once derelict city centres — but the sense of imbalance

remains. It’s less mass unemployment that worries people than immigration and crime. We don’t fear nuclear annihi-lation , but we do worry about terrorism.

This is a failure of politics. We had hoped that a New Labour time would revive confi dence in the public realm. So much has been frittered away. Some of it can be won back by the more aus-tere, serious administration that Brown promises. But the real change, the reason that 2007 should mark a turning point, is that the public mood is turning away from hollow-hearted consumer-ism, if only for environmental reasons.

The greatest challenge is global warming. This isn’t only about tax rates, car travel or cheap fl ights. It is about the culture of wastefulness and excess. It is about the droughts and famines that are pro-

voking the wars and migrations that, in turn, provoke the pessimism recorded in the YouGov poll. It can only be matched by a revival of politics, not simply as the act of a few at Westminster but as a sys-tem we support and believe in. In their diff erent ways, both Brown and Cam-eron know this very well.

The years ahead are not going to be hairshirt years. This is still going to be a remarkably well-off and lucky country. But the party is over. It is time to look around at all those who were never invited to it in the fi rst place; to end the habit of waste. Far from being a gloomy prospect, it is likely to revive and enthuse anyone with public spirit. In the past few years, politics has been degraded into a grimy suburb of celebrity culture, which provided fuel for comedy but which ordi-nary people stopped taking seriously. Iraq gave all that an angry edge, reminding everyone that political decisions could still have terrible consequences.

Now, in this new year, we have the chance to move on. No doubt there are plenty of follies and failures just around the corner. There always are. But 2007 should be, and can be, the year when a gust of optimism blew into town.

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The new year holds great promise: a new prime minister, an invigorated opposition, and a turning away from excess

Jackie Ashley

Six out of Hollywood’s 12 biggest hits last year were sequels. Next year, the pro-portion could be higher. A part of us is expected to nod at this news and say: “Business as usual.” Another part is asked to

sigh at the falling back on old habits. Whatever view you care to hold, there

are so-called laws waiting to serve you — that every sequel earns less than the original; or: if you’ve got something that works, why throw it away? But no one in Hollywood trusts anything, and that’s why they like to talk in rules — it’s a protection against insecurity.

I have a friend, a retired projectionist — not that they really use projectionists any longer. But he projected pictures in the 40s, in packed houses, in the days when people went to the pictures, and not to see a particular movie.

Anyway, my friend used to read the things I wrote about the movies and he told me I was complicating the matter. “All this fancy commentary on a picture. Let me tell you what happens: I turn the house lights out; I turn the projector on; the story starts; people see something they never saw before; but they see a story just like all the others they ever saw. They are moved. They laugh. They are scared. I turn the projector off . I put the house lights on. They go home. Next week they come back.”

I like that idea. The movies are a habit, and a big part of us just wants them to be like they were before. Sur-prise me, we ask, show me something new — but let me recognise it.

Jean Renoir said that a fi lm-maker made the same fi lm over and over again. He tried to change, but he couldn’t help it. He had his story. Orson Welles shocked everyone with Citizen Kane so they said they’d never seen a fi lm like it. But then over the years, he used the same images — the way painters do — and he had this recurring situation of a powerful man being investigated and found out — The Stranger, Mr Arkadin, Touch of Evil .

When the old studios had people under contract that the public loved, they made vehicles for those stars . So a Joan Crawford might curse the system and beg for something fresh, but the studios said: “Joan, dear, you’re always best as Joan.” And in the end, she was “Joan Crawford” with those big staring, lost eyes, and every real person she’d ever tried to be had faded away.

And you don’t put Lassie in a Crawford picture, or vice versa. It’s a business, and if the public like a person-ality, you tell the stories that make the personality look good. A mythology develops, a whole set of legends — we call it the star system and the code of genres. And we enjoy these rules because they are the schemes by which we know we should be wary of Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet but trust Bogart and Bergman.

You see, we say we go to the movies to hear stories we never heard before. But in practice we like it when the whole thing is close to deja vu, because then it seems to confi rm the old dream. It’s fun at the movies because it used to be.

Of course, the movies are changing. Many of the old rules are crumbling. And there are artists ready to test us in new ways. But as soon as the new ways work, they become institutionalised. No one thought The Godfather would do well. It became the most successful fi lm made in 1972. So they let Coppola make The Godfather: Part II. It did far less well, but it’s a better fi lm because in doing part one Coppola had learned new ways of doing a story, and the uneasy possibility that at the end a villain could be left in charge. That was new for a moment. Now everyone does it.

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of [email protected]

The comfort of deja vu

We say we go to the movies to hear new stories, but in practice we prefer the familiar

David Thomson

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�This age of Blair was also an age of plenty, but that has not produced a happier or more stable country


January

Milestone on the road to nowhere

The era of weak governments

The world in

Iraq after Saddam

In praise of… vegetarianism

Saddam Hussein’s execution is likely to make little diff erence to the fate of the country he ruled so cruelly for more than two decades. Few can now doubt that he was guilty of ter-rible crimes against humanity — his own peo-ple and others — and showed not a shred of remorse. Millions around the world were able to watch the grotesque, sordid spectacle of his fi nal, defi ant moments, cursing “Americans, spies and Persians” to the very end. It is hard to imagine that Iraq’s bloody divisions could get very much deeper. Reactions there — and there can be no mistaking the jubilation along-side the apathy and the fury — have predictably been split entirely along sectarian lines.

The spate of killings that followed was equally predictable; Saturday’s 90 or so dead was a fairly average daily toll. Even with Saddam buried, the violence seems to have an unstoppable momentum of its own. Nuri al-Maliki’s government signed his death war-rant, but it has been unable to defuse or crush the Sunni insurgency, end the routine suicide bombings, kidnappings and murder, or ensure that its own Shia security forces do not act as sectarian death squads. A government whose writ barely runs beyond Baghdad’s Green Zone and whose commitment to justice consists of little more than killing the tyrant is hardly a

government worth the name. It could have been done differently. The twisted politics of war and occupation poisoned the judicial process that allowed hooded thugs to place the noose around Saddam’s neck, taunting him as they did. That process was fundamentally fl awed. Neither judges nor lawyers showed an understanding of international criminal law. Witnesses testifi ed anonymously, defence law-yers were murdered and a judge was removed under government pressure. A UN or interna-tional tribunal in a neutral venue would have been better.

It bears repeating that the death penalty remains a cruel and unusual punishment. It was only a matter of time before the lightly sanitised offi cial version of the execution was supplemented by uncensored mobile phone pictures of the whole tawdry event — snaps from the scaff old for our digital age. Perhaps (an unintended useful consequence?) they will win new recruits to the abolitionist cause.

Saddam went unrepentantly to the gallows because of one atrocity: the killings of 148 Shia villagers after a failed assassination attempt in Dujail in 1982. But justice, and the memory of his many thousands more victims, would have been better served if had stood trial for the “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds for which

he and his accomplices were accused of geno-cide. The same is true for the crushing of the Kurdish and Shia rebellions after the 1991 Gulf war, and for his invasions of Kuwait and Iran. It may be naïve to believe that a diff erent judicial course might possibly have served some puta-tive process of truth and reconciliation to help heal Iraq’s wounds. But it is certain that noth-ing but vengeance and retribution are served by the brutal and public manner of his end.

The hanging took place as President Bush (breathtakingly hailing it as “a step towards democracy”) was consulting advisers at his ranch to plan his next Iraqi move — anticipat-ing the moment when US fatalities, which have already surpassed the dead of the 9/11 attacks, reach 3,000. At least there was no American awkwardness at the use of the death penalty. That had a squirming Margaret Beckett repeat-ing Britain’s principled opposition to it but bizarrely “respecting” Iraq’s sovereign right to use it. Saddam’s crimes were committed in the name of sovereignty too. His execution can only augur badly for the future of a ruined country that is now worse off in so many ways than it was in the darkest days of his dictatorship. The condemned man boasted he was prepared to die as a sacrifi ce for Iraq. But this ghastly mile-stone of his death will do it no good at all.

Twelve years ago Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over. A dozen years on, it is not obvious that he got it right. Since 9/11 in particular, the US federal government has grown not shrunk, while on this side of the Atlantic governments are either spending more heavily than before on domestic programmes — as the Blair government has been doing — or are agonising indecisively about whether and how to wield the knife on historically large ones — as Angela Merkel is doing in Germany. The rhetoric of big government solutions may have declined, but much of the reality of it remains, though whether for good, for ill, or for both, remains a matter of lively argument.

A much more clear-cut change in the years since Mr Clinton’s pronouncement would be the end not of big government but of strong government. Looking around the governments of the developed and democratic world on this

The aftermath of the Tay bridge disaster

Claxton, Norfolk

At dusk it was the murder scene in the woods that got me thinking about predator-prey relations.

Across the leaf litter were the typi-cal remains of a sparrowhawk kill — a wild corolla of plucked pigeon feath-ers scattered around a central carcass. At its epicentre was the exposed breast bone of the victim, the neck

and head performing a lifeless arc to one side.

I tried to imagine the moment of impact, with the pigeon pinned hope-lessly down, the hawk’s yellow eyes staring into the wood’s middle dis-tance as it made that funny kneeding action with the talons, slowly massag-ing the life from its prey.

When I walked out on to the marsh there were two other predators at work. A wildfowler was already scattering grain along the dyke in preparation for the duck at nightfall. Beyond him, dissolving in the haze of late afternoon, a barn owl was patrol-ling its beat.

I too was made to feel like a predator when a Chinese water deer, alarmed by my silhouette, charged

away across the fi eld and lay down in a hollow.

Only its head was visible and while it stared in my direction, I knew it couldn’t see me. Chinese water deer are short-sighted creatures and within 15-minutes of complete still-ness I was rewarded by the deer’s nervous return. It alternated between an anxious grazing and even more edgy pauses, when it would sniff the air and stare towards the site of its original alarm.

Chinese water deer are Asian imports to the UK that have estab-lished a self-sustaining population. They bring a hint of exoticism to the Broads. One friend suggested they had something of the hyena about the head. To me the facial expression

— the black button nose and round furry ears — seems rather ursine or, at least, teddy bear-like. Yet the tusks on the males (a protruding pair of canines) don’t quite fi t the otherwise cute image.

My male soon abandoned all fear of me and, in fact, abandoned thoughts of predators altogether, in favour of that other great transaction of the dark. His looping trot took him straight to another deer of smaller and more delicate build. She stopped graz-ing and sniff ed him, their necks briefl y entwining, before she turned away and he rose up.

Through the gloom I could just make out their single silhouette at one with the night.Mark Cocker

Dundee, Wednesday evening. The work of exploring the wreck of the North British train now lying in the river Tay has been prosecuted with great vigour today, and has resulted in important discoveries.

It must be admitted that operations hitherto have been slow, but, three divers having been employed, only two could work at one time, owing to the provision of but two diving ves-sels. The Government have evidently taken notice of this, for the Admiralty sent to Dundee the district coastguard to investigate matters and order assistance if he deemed it necessary.

The people of Dundee heard tonight with satisfaction that increased eff orts to discover the bod-ies will be made tomorrow

However, up to the present time it is clear to all that the bodies of the human beings who occupied the fi rst part of the train on Sunday have been washed away and may never be recov-ered. Major Marindin, Government inspector, observed today that, even supposing any are among the debris, the probabilities are that they have been crushed to such an extent as to be beyond all recognition.

The search party started at eight o’clock in the morning, long before it could be said to be light. The scene of the disaster was reached by 8.30 and the barge and the launch were moored between the third and the fi fth demol-ished piers.

A third-class carriage, with its roof off , was standing on its wheels, a fact attributed to the action of the cur-rent when the vehicle fi rst entered the water. The diver searched the carriage on his fi rst errand but found no trace of human remains or personal baggage.

[One diver reported] his hand had come into contact with some form of substance, and there were objects fl oating about which he believed might be corpses. Probing with a boat hook, the diver found that it stuck into something he found to be a rail-way carriage cushion, which was fol-lowed by a quantity of horse-hair pad-ding. The man alleged that he caught hold of something which seemed to him to be the dress of a female.

[Other evidence was found] pretty plainly showing that it could not have been owing to the train leaving the rails and colliding with the ironwork that the bridge fell, a theory previ-ously much in vogue.

After the fi nding of the engine, the locomotive superintendent suggested that if the diver went down again he might fi nd the bodies of the driver and the stoker.

At a meeting convened by the Provost of Dundee the sum of £1,800 was raised for the suff erers, the North British Railway Company subscribing £500, the Directors £500, and Thomas Bouch, engineer of the bridge £250.

[Sir Thomas Bouch’s] view is not that the fall of the bridge was the direct result of the force of the storm exerted with overpowering violence upon bridge and train together but the indirect result of that force exerted upon the travelling train.

The hypothesis is that the car-riages were by a sudden gust of wind tilted against the girders with a force which, Sir Thomas says, no girders are intended to withstand.

More than 75 passengers died when the centre of the Tay bridge collapsed under their train in a violent night storm on December 28 1879. An offi -cial inquiry found against Sir Thomas Bouch’s design and construction. He died within a year.

fi rst day of 2007, the most striking common fac-tor is their political weakness. In the US, George Bush’s power has been crippled by last year’s midterm elections and the strategic failures of the war on terror. In Canada, Stephen Harper’s minority government, elected less than a year ago, may not see out 2007 without a fresh man-date. In Germany, Ms Merkel’s grand coalition of left and right has run into increasing domestic political diffi culties. In France, Jacques Chirac’s government is limping towards the electoral fi nishing line in May, with no guarantee that its replacement, whether from the left or the right, will have much greater authority. In Italy, Romano Prodi governs on that country’s tradi-tional knife-edge. In Britain, Tony Blair is a defi -ant but unmistakably lame duck. The G7 may dub themselves the world’s economic great powers, but they are not great power govern-ments. Only in Japan does one of them have a

government with anything much resembling a political future this year.

Part of this is circumstantial. A few rolls of the electoral dice could result in a set of gov-ernments with clearer mandates by 2009. But the real weakness runs deeper. Modern gov-ernments do not shape the world as they once did, but nor do they shape their own societies either. Faced with globalisation, modern media and democracy, national governments fi nd it hard to get results and re-elected. The nature of leadership has changed — and so has the nature of what it means to be led. Messrs Bush and Blair often describe themselves as strong leaders, but their low public esteem reveals a huge gap between their sort of strength and true eff ectiveness. Their successors will prom-ise to do better. But the art of combining small government with strong government is likely to remain as elusive in 2007 as it was in 2006.

What with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s real-meat mincemeat and Nigella Lawson’s goose fat, Christmas 2006 seemed at times to be one of the meatiest. A week after the event, many Britons are still recycling the Yuletide bird and pulling the stringy bits from between their teeth . Yet a large minority also eschewed the Christmas fl esh-fest in favour of alternatives that have come a long way since the days of tex-tured vegetable protein. Humane meat is now more popular than ever, representing a huge

break from the cruelty of the factory farm, but vegetarians still look elsewhere . Ethical doubts about meat date back to Plato. Now environ-mental concerns are entering the equation too: when it takes 10 kilos of feed to make one of beef, cattle-farming swallows land and all too often forest. Like most human ideas, vegetari-anism is rarely applied with perfect logic. Veg-etarian Hindus in Kerala justify eating fi sh by labelling it a type of egg laid by the sea. Vegans object that those who continue to chomp on

cheese and eggs collude with an industry that continues to kill animals. It is also true that there are ethical dilemmas about many non-meat foods in the modern world — like the fruit and vegetables fl own in from distant continents at the expense of the ozone layer. For all that, vegetarianism confronts ethical questions that a lot of us prefer to ignore. And, on a day when new year’s resolutions are being set, it is likely that more people than ever will decide that this seasonal turkey will have been their last.

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Letters and emails

Flawed justice and the death of a dictator

Though few people in the world will miss Saddam Hussein (Saddam executed, December 30) and his vile crimes, we are opening up a Pandora’s box of legal and other issues that will result from his execution by a govern-ment that many see as an illegitimate puppet of the US and Britain.

Iraq has yet to become a stable, demo-cratic nation with a properly functioning government that serves and is respected and trusted by all Iraqis. Saddam ’s trial by a dubious court, similar to the trial of Slobodan Milosevic by a non-Yugo-slav kangaroo court, will be seen by many Iraqis as a farce; and Iraq’s former leader (just like Milosevic) will be seen by many as a martyr who was executed because he resisted the Bush family and US/British imperialism. Prepare for much more violence in his name.Dr Michael PravicaHenderson, Nevada, USA

• The sectarian overtones to the tim-ing of Saddam Hussein’s execution should not be overlooked. In foreign secretary Margaret Beckett’s character-istically awkward phrase, he was “held to account” for killings carried out in Dujail, following a 1982 assassination attempt against him. The tribunal found the Dujail killings to be a crime against humanity, a conclusion it did not stoop to justifying with a written judgment. Dujail was the predicable outcome of the failure of an assassination bid staged by the Dawa party. That party is repre-sented in the current Iraqi government by prime minister Nouri al-Maliki .

By pushing Saddam on to the gallows, Maliki closed the dossier on Saddam’s much bloodier and arguably much more serious war crimes against Iran, Kuwait and his genocidal campaign against the Kurds. The execution is tainted by the involvement of Maliki’s party in the ter-rorist campaign that provoked the Dujail reprisals. It is all a very long way from the justice Saddam deserved.John SpencerLondon

• I listened to the news of Saddam Hussein’s execution with tears of frus-tration welling in my eyes. This is what has been achieved by the regime that

governs my country. It is not just that such judicial murder is a symbol of bru-tality and immaturity of spirit, but that it is so obviously foolhardy. Tony Blair has never understood the reaction of millions in this country before the war of 2003. They thought about the conse-quences of the invasion of Iraq and saw it as utterly mad, releasing untold death and misery in the region and incalcula-ble national and international harm.

The execution of Saddam, following the narrowly conceived and fl awed trial of this dreadful man, follows the same thought pattern. Now we have helped to create Saddam the martyr. How many additional deaths will happen as a consequence? What further horrors must we now lay at the door of Blair’s regime, which has so betrayed the interests of the British people it claims to serve?Professor Tony Booth Canterbury Christ Church University

• The judicial murder of Saddam Hus-sein, fi nally stripped away the last shred of morality from those who pathetically try to defend the illegal invasion of Iraq. The special court was established by the US specifi cally to try Saddam Hussein and his regime members. The whole process was eff ectively controlled by the US. The outcome of this trial was pre-determined. Ramsay Clark, once US attorney general and member of Sad-dam’s defence team, described the trial as “an assault on truth and justice”.

However, as grubby as this trial was, it wasn’t the grubbiest injustice. This was the policy imposed by the US and supported by the UK, to ensure that Saddam’s trial was held in Iraq and not at the international court of justice, and to limit what he was charged with to a crime that didn’t allow for a revelation into how the US and UK governments, along with businesses from those and other countries, had supported and

traded with Saddam, even while he was carrying out the most murderous atrocities . Brian AbbottCork, Ireland

• At the end, Saddam Hussein lived up to the horror comic of his life and mur-ders. He traded insults with his execu-tioners. But who were they, behind their masks? Offi cialising, as George W Bush might put it, in absentia, were himself, long a believer and deliverer of state-sponsored death, and Tony Blair, whom we might have assumed refl ects Britain’s rejection of the death penalty. How wrong we are.

Whatever else this travesty has been, it is the fi rst case in more than 40 years of our government’s collusion in an execution. And, so far, we have heard no regrets.Tim LlewellynLondon

Arise, Sir Oscar

The destructive forces unleashed by the widening pay gap

So, the media is getting excited about the prime minister’s holiday (Leaders, December 29). But what of the free holi-days that inform many travel features ? I have also heard journalists boast about the plays, fi lms etc they gain free admis-sion to “because we are press”. David WotherspoonDownholland, West Lancashire

• A newspaper editor can go on holiday without worrying about political assas-sination, the lenses of the paparazzi or being buttonholed for his opinions. If a millionaire’s mansion is the only place Blair and his family can get some peace and quiet, good luck to them.Chris WhiteLondon

• As a 50-something, I have Ezio and Bruce Springsteen on my iPod, but no Cliff or Bee Gees music, although I’d accept a free holiday from them (The secrets of Blair’s iPod, December 29).Linda BristowOswestry, Shropshire

• My friends, family and I have been walking in the countryside, going to the cinema, lunching in cafes, talking and socialising (Life without a parachute, December 30). Shopping has featured nowhere during these precious days.Claire SalisburyDerby

• Are the new year honours the new Oscars ? After all, entertainers need all the recognition they can get for their unsatisfying, arduous, poorly rewarded work.John DaviesKirkby-in-Cleveland, North Yorks

• Forget the stolen bowling plans (Sport, December 28). England has won a psychological advantage by not batting to any plan .Philip JohnsonBarnsley

Brendan Barber is right to ask if the pay gap between top executives and workers is having a “divisive eff ect on society” (Report, December 28). If he reads research by Richard Wilkinson into the eff ects of inequality, he would reach a clear answer: “yes”. Inequality kills. Wilkinson discovered that inequal-ity has a negative impact on both our physical and mental health. The wider the income gap, the worse the impact. Although the poorest suff er most in an unequal society, everyone’s health gets attacked by stress and anxiety.

Wilkinson’s research for his books Unhealthy Societies and The Impact of Inequality is breathtaking in its thoroughness and ability to refute alternative explanations of such things as health problems. We also now know from other research that levels of trust are higher in more equal societies. Social mobility is also improved in an egalitarian state. For instance, Denmark has better social mobility than the US. Equality is simply better for democracy. If a society is seen as being just or fair,

people join in. The research backs this up: unequal societies eat away at the social fabric. Perhaps Barber needs to visit the Nordic countries for a few answers?Graeme Kemp Wellington, Shropshire

• The damage wrought in human terms by the obscene City bonuses, recently highlighted in the media, is real enough, but the left would make an enormous mistake by bringing back “the politics of envy”, as advocated by Peter Wilby (Comment, December 29). To do so would simply reinforce the image of the left as being reactive and negative rather than creative and positive.

Thus the antisocial increase in house prices that results from these infl ated payments can be countered by a vast increase in public home-building . The criminality that results from the widen-ing gap between rich and poor can be remedied by stimulating investment outside the home counties . And the best way to nullify the impact produced by

the super-rich buying themselves into the best education and medical care is to set our schools and hospitals free from the stultifying bureaucracy that prevents them from giving the best possible service to the taxpayer. Walter CairnsManchester

• Peter Wilby is right but he does not go far enough. The massive sums awarded to fat cats are not unconnected to real activity . Each £1m bonus equates to the production of at least 10,000 laptops in China or 450 Nissan Micras in Sunder-land — all of which produces the emis-sions that are killing the planet. These people are driving the demands that rack up unnecessary production, fuel unnecessary consumerism and leave the unhappy masses turning to junk food for consolation. When will politi-cians realise the link between growing inequality, environmental destruction and the obesity epidemic? Dr Tony MorganCambridge

Green light fora food fi ght

The reason why many leading food manufacturers and retailers are opposed to the Food Standards Agency’s call for a traffi c lights system for food labelling is because it will work (Food agency takes on industry over junk labels, December 28). Industry leaders should be ashamed of themselves for resisting the introduc-tion of this simple and quick tool to help people make an informed choice about what they buy. If companies such as Kellogg’s are concerned about the eff ect on the sales of their products, then they should make those products healthier, not try to keep consumers unaware of what they are eating. The Food Stand-ards Agency must not give in to this cynical industry campaign.Richard MountfordTonbridge, Kent

• The Food Standards Agency’s “traf-fi c lights” scheme for food labelling is over-simplistic, while the complex set of guideline daily amounts (GDAs) pro-posed by the food industry is, perhaps deliberately, impenetrable.

So how about combining the basic elements of each? You could retain the GDA listings, but simply colour the tags when they reached certain levels, as proposed by the FSA’s nutritional experts. Once salt levels reached, say, 5% of the GDA, the tag could be yellow, over 10% red, and so on for the other “bad” components such as unsaturated fats, sugars etc.

This would satisfy those wanting the details, while making it relatively easy for the rest of us to avoid foodstuff s with red as the most prominent part of the label. David ReedLondon

• In February the government is to announce the fi ndings of its “people’s panel”, recommending that the obese do not get priority NHS treatment. Yet the food industry seeks to block the correct labelling of its products, which would make it much easier for people to avoid high-fat and high-sugar foods, ie those contributing most to obesity. How are people to avoid obesity if the major industry food producers and retailers prevent them getting basic knowledge about the food’s contents?

The article quotes Alastair Sykes, chief executive of Nestlé UK. “We’re driven by consumers and what they want, and much of what we do has been to make our products healthier,” he said. Is he claiming consumers previ-ously demanded unhealthy foods? Does it not bother people that supermarkets and food producers market “health foods”, a tacit admission that the rest of their output is unhealthy? How has it come to pass that supermarkets and processed food producers dominate the food chain in this country when they peddle unhealthy foods? Robin TudgeLondon

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Unfair scorn for Duke Hussey

If Duke Hussey had never done anything other than be still standing on two feet into his 80s despite the appalling wounds he suff ered during the second world war, he would have deserved better than Dan van der Vat’s sneering obituary (December 28). As it is, that outpouring of snobbish bile dishon-oured the memory of a truly decent and courageous man who held the chairmanship of the BBC through 10 diffi cult but successful years. It ignored his wicked sense of humour, his infi nite concern for the personal wellbeing of all manner of people he came into con-tact with and his passionate love of and defence of public service broadcasting.

By circumstance Duke Hussey could easily have been the caricature Van der Vat portrays — stupid, snobbish, in thrall to powerful governments. In fact, he was none of these. Those of us who worked closely with him during his BBC days have cause to mourn a brave man and a faithful friend. Everyone who still enjoys a BBC that is strong, independ-ent and free of party political trammels owes him better than Van der Vat’s mean- spirited piece.Liz ForganLondon

Saddam Hussein

An opportunist and brutal dictator, he wreaked havoc on Iraq, the Middle East and the world

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who w as exe-cuted early on Saturday morning at the age of 69, may not yield many general biographies — he was personally too uninteresting for that

— but he will be a case study for politi-cal scientists for years to come. For he was the model of a certain type of developing world despot, who was, for more than three decades, as suc-cessful in his main ambition, which was taking and keeping total power, as he was destructive in exercising it.

Yet at the same time, he was commonplace and derivative. The Soviet dictator Stalin was his exemplar. The likeness came from more than conscious emulation: he already resembled him in origin, temperament and method. Like him, he was unique less in kind than in degree, in the extraordinary extent to which, if the more squalid forms of human villainy are the sine qua non of the successful tyrant, he embodied them. Like Stalin, too, he had little of the flair or colour of other 20th-century despots, little mental brilliance, less charisma, no redeeming passion or messianic fervour; he was only exceptional in the magnitude of his thuggery, the brutality, opportunism and cunning of the otherwise dull, grey apparatchik.

His rise to power was no more accidental than Stalin’s. If he had not mastered Iraq as he did, someone very similar probably would have, and very probably also from Tikrit. Saddam’s peculiar fortune was that, on his political majority, this small, drab town, on the Tigris upstream from Baghdad, was already poised to wrest a very special role in Iraqi history.

Saddam was born in the nearby village of Owja, into the mud house of his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, and into what a Tikriti contemporary of his called a world “full of evil”. His father, Hussein al-Majid, a landless peasant, had died before his birth, and his mother, Sabha, could not support the orphan, until she took a third husband.

Hassan Ibrahim took to extremes local Bedouin notions of a hardy upbringing. For punishment, he beat his stepson with an asphalt-covered stick. Thus, from earliest infancy, was Saddam nurtured — like a Stalin born into very similar circumstances — in the bleak conviction that the world is a congenitally hostile place, life a ceaseless struggle for survival, and survival only achieved through total self-reliance, chronic mistrust and the imperious necessity to destroy others before they destroy you.

The sufferings visited on the child begat the sufferings the man, warped, paranoid, omnipotent, visited on an entire people. Like Stalin, he hid his emotions behind a facade of impassivity; but he assuredly had emotions of a virulent kind — an insatiable thirst for vengeance on the world he hated.

To fend off attack by other boys, Saddam carried an iron bar. It became the instrument of his wanton cruelty; he would bring it to a red heat, then stab a passing animal in the stomach, splitting it in half. Killing was considered a badge of courage among his male relatives. Saddam’s first murder was of a shepherd from a nearby tribe. This, and three more in his teens, were proof of manhood.

The small-town thug possessed all the personal qualifications he might need to earn his place in the 20th-century’s pantheon of tyrants. And the small town of Tikrit, lying in the heart of the Sunni Muslim “triangle” of central Iraq furnished the operational ones, too. Orthodox Sunni Arabs are only a small minority, 15% at most, of Iraq’s population, outnumbered by the Shias of the south, 60% at least, and the Kurds of the mountainous north. Yet they always dominated Iraq’s political life.

Thanks partly to the decline of traditional river traffic, Tikritis had taken to supplying the British-controlled Iraqi state with a dis-proportionate number of its soldiers. With time and plentiful purges, they emerged within the army as a distinct

group; a preponderance which had been fortuitous at first finally became so great they could deliberately enlarge it. A close-knit minority within the Sunni minority, they exploited ties of region, clan and family to seize control of the army, then the state. Saddam, perfect recruit to the sinister, violent, conspiratorial underworld that was Iraqi politics, positioned himself at the heart of this process.

He himself was never a soldier, but he used a formidable array of Tikritis who were, and Ba’athists to boot. Ba’athism was a radical, pan-Arab nationalist doctrine then sweeping the region. Though doubtless impelled in that direction by the extreme, chauvinist beliefs of his uncle Khairallah, who had been dismissed from the army and imprisoned for five years for his part in a 1941 attack on an RAF base near Baghdad, it was mainly out of convenience, not conviction, that Saddam joined the party; strong in Tikrit and the Sunni “triangle”, dedicated to force not persuasion, it readily appealed to a man of his ambition and temper.

In theory he remained a Ba’athist to his dying day, but for him Ba’athism was always an apparatus, never an ideology: no sooner was command of the one complete than he dispensed entirely with the other. For next to brutality, opportunism was his chief trait. Not Stalin himself could have governed with such whimsy, or lurched, ideologically, politically, strategically, from one extreme to another with quite such ease, regularity, and disastrous consequences, and yet still, incredibly, retain command to the end.

The Ba’ath, and other “revolutionary” parties, had come into their own with the overthrow, in 1958, of the “reactionary”, British-created Hashemite monarchy. They quickly fell out with General Kassem’s new regime and with each other, rivalries that expressed themselves mainly in streetfighting and assassinations. That was the way of life that Saddam fell into as a street-gang leader, after going, in 1955, to live with his uncle in Baghdad to study at Karkh high school.

Saddam first achieved national prominence in 1959 with a bungled attempt to kill Kassem. He seems to have lost his nerve and opened fire prematurely. But though his role was less than glorious, it became an essential component of the Saddam legend — that of the dauntless young revolutionary extracting a bullet from his leg with his own hand, and, with security forces in hot pursuit, swimming the icy waters of the Euphrates, knife between clenched teeth, before galloping to safety across the Syrian desert ; eventually fetching up in Cairo, where his university law studies were terminated by the next political convulsion back home — Kassem’s overthrow in February 1963.

Securing a share in the new regime, the Ba’athists lost it the following November when they fell out with the other parties. Pushed back into the underground, Saddam took what subsequently turned out to be his first, concrete step towards supreme office. In 1964, he formed the Jihaz al-Hunein, the Instrument of Yearning, the first, embryonic version of a terror apparatus of which, in its full fruition, Stalin would not have been ashamed.

It was an outgrowth of the party. That meant that, through it, Saddam, though not an officer, could now see his way to the summit. But at this stage his main asset was his collaboration with his fellow-Tikriti, Brigadier Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Thanks to a combination of Bakr’s traditional military means and Saddam’s new, “civilian” ones, the pair pulled off the “glorious July 1968 Revolution”.

At 31, as deputy sec-retary general of the Ba’ath party, Saddam was the power behind President Bakr’s throne. But at fi rst he assumed, like Stalin in his similar period,

a disarmingly modest and retiring demeanour as he lay the foundations of what he called a new kind of rule; “With our party methods,” he said, “there is no chance for anyone who disagrees with us to jump on a couple of tanks and overthrow the government.” Gradually he subordinated the army to the party.

There was nothing modest about the Ba’athists’ inaugural reign of terror; few knew it then, but it was chiefly his handiwork, and quite different from anything hitherto experienced in a country already notorious for its harsh


political tradition. Saddam’s henchmen presided over “revolutionary tribunals” that sent hundreds to the firing squad on charges of puerile, trumped up absurdity. They called on “the masses” to “come and enjoy the feast”: there was the hanging of “Jewish spies” in Liberation Square amid ghoulish festivities and bloodcurdling official harangues.

That was the public face. Behind it were such places as the Palace of the End. So called because King Faisal died there in the 1958 Revolution, it was now more aptly named than ever. Saddam’s first security chief, Nadhim Kzar, had turned it into a chamber of horrors. But Kzar, a Shia, nursed a grudge against his Sunni patrons; in 1973, he turned against them; Saddam, Bakr and a host of top Tikritis had a very narrow escape indeed.

Thereafter the badly shaken number two relied almost entirely on Tikritis; the more sensitive the post, the more closely related its incumbent would be to himself. Meanwhile, with guile and infinite patience, he worked his way towards his supreme goal. Purge followed judicious purge, first aimed at the Ba’athists’ rivals, then the army, then the party, then influential, respected, or strategically located people whom he deemed most liable, at some point, to cry halt to his inexorable ascension.

When, in June 1979, all was set for him to depose and succeed the ailing Bakr, he could have accomplished it with bloodless ease. But he chose blood in what was a psychological as well as a symbolic necessity. He had to inaugurate the “era of Saddam Hussein” with a rite whose message would be unmistakable: there had arisen in Mesopotamia a ruler who, in his barbaric splendour, cruelty and caprice, was to yield nothing to its despots of old.

Only now did he emerge, personally and very publicly, as accuser, judge and executioner in one. He called an extraordinary meeting of senior party cadres. They were solemnly informed that “a gang disloyal to the party and the revolution” had mounted a “base conspiracy” in the service of “Zionism and the forces of darkness”, and that all the “traitors” were right there, with them, in the hall. One of their ringleaders, brought straight from prison, made a long and detailed confession of his “horrible crime”.

Saddam, puffi ng on a Havana cigar, calmly watched the proceedings as if they had nothing to do with him. Then he took the podium. He began to read out the “traitors’” names, slowly and theatrically; he seemed

quite overcome as he did so, pausing only to light his cigar or wipe away his tears with a handkerchief. All 66 “trai-tors” were led away one by one.

Thus did the new president make inaugural use of that essential weapon of the ultimate tyrant, the occasional flamboyant, contemptuous act of utter lawlessness, turpitude or unpredictability, and the enforced prostration of his whole apparatus, in praise and rejoicing, before it. Those of the audience who had not been named showed their relief with hysterical chants of gratitude and a baying for the blood of their fallen comrades. Saddam then called on ministers and party leaders to join him in personally carrying out the “democratic executions”; every party branch in the country sent an armed delegate to assist them. It was, he said, “the first time in the history of revolutionary movements without exception, or perhaps of human struggle, that over half the supreme leadership had taken part in a tribunal” which condemned the other half. “We are now,” he confided, “in our Stalinist era.”

But in one way he had actually surpassed his exemplar. Upon entering the Kremlin, the former Georgian streetfighter had at least kept himself aloof from his “great terror”. Not Saddam. Newly exalted, he was to remain down-to-earth too; new caliph of Baghdad, but, direct participant in his own terror, very much the Tikriti gangster, too.

The “Leader, President, Struggler” now emerged as a regional and international actor with the disproportionate capacity for promoting well-being and order or wreaking havoc which Iraq’s great strategic and political importance, vast oil wealth, relatively educated citizenry and powerful army conferred on him. With U-turns, blunders and megalomaniac whimsies, he chose havoc; he wreaked it on the region and the world, but above all it descended on the land of Iraq itself. In September 1980 he went

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�Saddam was nurturedin the bleak conviction that the world is a congenitallyhostile place

Obituaries

Saddam Hussein fi res shots into the air to mark the start of a military parade in 2000, during which 1,000 Russian-made tanks rumbled through Baghdad. Photograph: Faleh Kheiber/Reuters

to war against Iran. It was known as “Saddam’s Qadisiyah”, after the Arabs’ early Islamic victory over the Persians. His official, strictly limited war aims revolved round the Shatt al-Arab estuary and his determination to renegotiate the “Algiers agreement” he had concluded a mere five years before. A dire emergency had forced that humiliation on him: the Iraqi army had been close to defeat in its campaign to suppress the last great, Iranian-backed Kurdish uprising led by Mullah Mustafa Barazani. The quid pro quo for Algiers had been the American-inspired withdrawal of the Shah’s support for Barazani.

His “Qadisiyah”, first of his spectacular volte-faces, was now to avenge the humiliation. But he also had a higher, unofficial aim: to weaken or destroy the Ayatollah Khomeini’s new-born Islamic Republic, or at least its subversive potentialities in Iraq itself. For Iraq’s Shia majority now saw in their Iranian co-religionists a means of bringing down Sunni minority rule. Hitherto closely bound to the Soviet Union, Saddam now bid for the west’s favour as the Shah’s natural heir as the “strong man” of the Gulf.

In the terrible eight-year struggle that followed, the Ayatollah’s Iran remorselessly turned the tables on the Iraqi aggressor, recovered all its conquered territory, and, in a series of fearsome “human wave” off ensives, tried to con-quer Iraq, and turn it into the

world’s second “Islamic Republic”. That would have been a geopolitical

upheaval of incalculable consequences. To forestall it, the west, beneath a mask of outward neutrality, put its weight behind one unlovely regime because it found the other unlovelier still. While the frightened, oil-rich Gulf furnished cash, the west furnished conventional weapons, and the means to manufacture a whole array of unconventional ones: nuclear, chemical and biological. Almost miraculously, Saddam held out, until, in July 1988, Khomeini drank from what he called “the poisoned chalice” of a ceasefire.

Of course, Saddam hailed this, his “first Gulf war”, as a victory. Though what possible victory there could have been in an outcome which, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded and captured, immense physical destruction and economic havoc, left Iraq on a permanent war footing, still seeking to renegotiate the status of the Shatt al-Arab?

Even if he could not officially admit it, he had good reason to give his people some recompense for their sufferings. He made as if to offer them two things, material betterment and some democratisation. But he cannot have been serious about either. Thanks to the ravages of his “Qadisiyah”, he had no money for economic reconstruction. And, in another great volte-face, he staged a virtual counter-revolution against the one ideal of Ba’athism, its socialism, which he had made a passable attempt to put into practice. Worse, the main beneficiaries of the economic revisionism were the Tikriti pillars of his regime, now corrupt as well as despotic.

With the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the east European dictator he most closely resembled, Saddam abandoned talk of “the new pluralist trends” he discerned in the world. Indeed, he persisted, more surrealistically than ever, in the despot’s law: the more disastrous his deeds the more they should be glorified. His cult of personality expressed itself most overbearingly in monumental architecture, where the public — an amazing array of bizarre or futuristic memorials to his “Qadisiyah” — merged with the private (his proliferating palaces) in grandiose tribute to all the attributes, bordering on the divine, ascribed to him.

It reflected a degree of control that enabled him, amazingly, to embark, within two years of the first, on his “second Gulf war”, and then, more amazingly still, to survive that yet greater calamity in its turn. It was a resort to the classic diversionary expedient, a flashy foreign adventure, of the dictator in trouble at home. He cast himself once again as the pan-Arab champion, boasting that, having

secured the Arabs’ eastern flank against the Persians, he was now turning his attention westwards, with the aim of settling scores with the Arabs’ other great foe, the Zionists. He threatened “to burn half of Israel” with his weapons of mass destruction, thrilling large segments of an Arab public desperately short of credible heroes.

But instead of Israel, it was Kuwait which, on the night of August 2 1990, Saddam attacked, or, rather, gobbled up in its entirety. Hardly had he done that than, to appease Iran, he unilaterally re-accepted the Algiers agreement on the Shatt al-Arab. It was the most breathtaking of his volte-faces; even as he dragged his people into another unprovoked war, he was in effect telling them that, in the first, they had shed all that blood, sweat and tears for nothing.

The Kuwait invasion was the ultimate excess, whimsy and Promethean delusion of the despot: the belief that he could get away with anything. Yet nothing had encouraged this excess like the west’s indulgence of his earlier ones. Sure, it had never loved him. But neither had it protested at his use of chemical weapons against Iran. It had contented itself with little more than a wringing of hands when he went on to gas his own people.

In March 1988, in revenge for an Iranian territorial gain, he wiped out 5,000 Kurdish inhabitants of Halabja; then, the war over, he wiped out several thousand more in “Operation Anfal”, his final, genocidal attempt to solve his Kurdish problem. In effect, the west’s reaction had been to treat the Kurds as an internal Iraqi affair; exterminating them en masse may have briefly stirred the international conscience, but it tended, if anything, to reinforce the existing international order.

But now that he was so ungratefully, so shockingly threatening this order itself, the west finally awoke to the true nature of the monster it had nurtured. Before long, Saddam faced an American-led army of half a million men assembled in the Arabian desert.

He did not blench. And for a few months he won adulation as the latter-day Saladin, who, after Kuwait, would go on to liberate Palestine. He said his army was eagerly awaiting the coalition’s great land offensive to reconquer Kuwait; in “the mother of all battles”, Iraq would “water the desert with American blood”.

But he stood no chance. For a month, allied aircraft rained high-tech devastation on his army, air force, economic and strategic infrastructure. He panicked, ordering his army’s withdrawal from Kuwait. It was not enough for the allies. As their ground forces swept almost unopposed through Kuwait, then into southern Iraq, the withdrawal became a rout. They could have marched on Baghdad. He caved in utterly, accepting every demand that the allies made. Only then did they cease their advance.

They had shattered most of his “million-man army” except for its elite Republican Guards, held in reserve to defend the regime against the wrath of the people. And this time their wrath was truly unleashed. The two oppressed majorities, Shias and Kurds, staged their great uprisings. These began spontaneously, when a Shia tank commander, having fled from Kuwait to Basra, positioned his vehicle in front of one of those gigantic, ubiquitous murals of the tyrant and addressed it thus: “What has befallen us of defeat, shame and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations and your irresponsible actions.”

But the uprisings foundered on the rock of Saddam’s residual strength, western betrayal and, in the south, their own disorganisation, vengeful excesses and failure to distance themselves from Iranian expansionist designs. Exploiting the Sunni minority’s fear that if he went, so would many of them, in the most horrible of massacres, Saddam sent in his guards. Dreadful atrocities accompanied the slow reconquest of the south. And when the guards turned north, the whole population of “liberated” Kurdistan fled in panic through snow and bitter cold to Iran and Turkey.

The television images of that grim stampede caught the measure of western betrayal. Four weeks previously, President George Bush senior had urged the Iraqis to rise up. But when they did so, he turned a deaf ear to their pleas for help. “New Hitler” Saddam might be, but he was also the only barrier against the possible break-up of Iraq itself. Saudi Arabia, for one, could not tolerate the prospect. It told

the US it would work to replace Saddam with an army officer who would keep the country in safe, authoritarian, Sunni Muslim hands.

Saddam was saved again. And for 12 more years he hung on, as his people sank into social, economic and political miseries incomparably greater than those which had propelled him into Kuwait. Tikriti solidarity continued to preserve him against putsch and assassination. And never again would the people stage an uprising without assurance of success. Only the west couldprovide that. But the west, preoccupied with other crises, was paralysed.

It would, or could, not withdraw from what, after the Gulf war, it had put in place, a curious, contradictory amalgam of UN sanctions that penalised the Iraqi people, not its rulers, a moral commitment to safeguard “liberated” Kurdistan, an ineffectual “no-fly zone” over the Shia south. But it also feared to go further in and, completing the logic of what it had begun, join forces with a serious Iraqi opposition that could bring the tyrant down and keep the country in one piece thereafter. This was inertia, which, the longer it lasted, the more dearly the west would pay for in the end. Every now and then confrontations erupted between the world’s only superpower and this most exasperating of “rogue states”; they arose out of Saddam’s attempts to break out of his “box”, via some renewed threat to Kuwait, an incursion into the western-protected Kurdish enclave, or — most persistently — showdowns over the UN’s mission to divest Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

In the last of them, in 1998, his elite military and security apparatus took a four-day pounding from the air. Heavy though this was, it proved to be the last, symbolic flourish behind which the Clinton administration acquiesced in what, with the expulsion of the arms inspectors, was a diplomatic victory for Saddam.

In the end, it was less his own misdeeds that brought the despot down,but those of the man who, for a while, supplanted him as America’s ultimate villain, Osama bin Laden. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, but he fell victim none the less to the crusading militarism, the new doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, the close identification with a rightwing Israeli agenda, that now took full possession of the administration of George W Bush. Iraq became the first target among the three states (with Iran and North Korea) that it had placed on its “axis of evil”, and with the launch of the invasion by the US, UK and their allies in March 2003, Saddam’s days were numbered.

However, three years passed between his capture and his execution on Sat-urday. In December 2003, following a tip-off from an intel-ligence source, US

forces found him hiding in an under-ground refuge on a farm near Tikrit, where his life had begun. It was the middle of the next year before he was transferred to Iraqi custody, and in July 2004 the former president appeared in court to hear criminal charges. Another year passed before the prosecution was ready to proceed with counts related to the massacre in the small Shia town of Dujail in 1982. The trial at last opened in October 2005 and the proceedings were immediately adjourned. Saddam, who two months earlier had sacked his legal team, pleaded innocence. A second trial on war crimes charges relat-ing to the 1988 Anfal campaign opened on August 21 this year. He refused to enter a plea, and episodes of black farce, which characterised his earlier appear-ances in court, recurred, with the judge switching of his microphone because of his interruptions, and ejecting him from the court four times. The trial was adjourned on October 11, but on Novem-ber 5 the court handed down a guilty verdict and sentenced Saddam to death by hanging, a sentence confi rmed by Iraq’s highest court on December 26.

Saddam married Saida Khairallah in 1963. Their sons Uday and Qusay (obituaries, July 23 2003) were killed by American forces; they had three daughters.David Hirst

Saddam Hussein abd al-Majid, politician, born April 28 1937; died December 30 2006

This obituary appeared in Saturday’s late editions

�

�The west contenteditself with little more than a wringingof hands when hegassed his own people


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Weather&Crossword


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Weatherwatch

It came as a shock to travellers before Christmas that the weather, particu-larly fog, could disrupt their holiday plans. Even so it was not the inability of aircraft to land or take off that was the problem but the extra space and time needed by aircraft to avoid crash-ing into each other while parking at the terminals.

Before today’s advanced electronic wizardry, fog was the pilots’ and pas-sengers’ worst enemy. The only way to land then was by human eyes seeing the

runway. Commercial airliners were fre-quently diverted large distances to any airfi eld that was not fogbound.

Then along came Fido, military shorthand for Fog Intensive Disposal Of. Trenches were dug either side of the runway into which aircraft fuel was piped. In fog this was set alight, heating up the air so fast it absorbed the fog and allowed clear sight of the runway for approaching planes. In the latter part of the war it was a matter of life or death for returning bomber crews short on fuel

and was installed at 11 UK military air-fi elds. Fido is said to have saved the lives of 15,000 men and 2,500 planes return-ing to fogbound Britain from raids.

The cost of 200,000 gallons of fuel an hour, and the potential hazards involved, made Fido an expensive option for civil airlines, but the system was frequently used in fogbound loca-tions for decades after the war. Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris still had a Fido for emergencies until 1988. Paul Brown

Cryptic crossword

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15

16

17 18

19

20 21

22

23 24

25 26

No 23,962 set by Rufus

Stuck? Then call our solutions line on 09068 338238. Calls cost 60p per minute at all times. Service supplied by ATS.Want more? Access over 4,000 archive puzzles at guardian.co.uk/crossword.

Across

1 House gets money owing back for nursery (6)

5 The problem of race? (8) 9 Freshly minted trademark

three quarters fi nished (5-3)

10 Royal house, divided internally, naturally (6)

11 Oscar’s tiptop variety of bar snack (6,6)

13 Big name in the performing arts (4)

14 It’s slung out when scrapping (8)

17 Again, but for the last time? (4,4)

18 Slough outbuilding (4) 20 Party under cover? (12) 23 Potency of port half an

hour later (6) 24 Such tolerance may be a

matter of degree (8) 25 Tyres can burst in race (8) 26 Neglect order issued (6)

Down

2 I got up to receive the king — a terrible person (4)

3 One tap bar drunk may think himself Napoleon (9)

4 Give fellow a note (6) 5 Timothy and Helen, two

combining in aria (2,4,3,6) 6 How bookies pay place

money? (4,4) 7 On which adders slide to

and fro? (5) 8 He turns on a spider,

perhaps (3,7)

12 A tenor isn’t out to be loud (10)

15 Cobbler’s farewell ceremony? (4,5)

16 The Scriptures completely recorded, it’s reported (4,4)

19 Revised point I’d raised with Edward (6)

21 Perfect way to make a hole (2,3)

22 Roman day that is endless (4)

Winners of Christmas prize puzzle 23,957.The winners of a Collins English Dictionary are D and G Price of Market Lavington, Devizes; D J and B A Taylor of Carsluith, Newton Stewart; M and J Georgeson of Birmingham; A F Roberts of Barnston, Wirral; M Tomkins of Devon; D and S Dare of Edinburgh; A E Knight of Caversham, Reading; J Poarch of Bradley Stoke, Bristol; Mrs A Pocklington of Swanage, Dorset and M Doherty of Newtonabbey.Please allow 28 days for delivery

R O S E B U G S P E A S E B L O S S O M

U M O O U X T A B E U

S N O U T T O N S U R E T H E S E U S

T K T O H H B B T T R H R D T

P H I L O S T R A T E H I P P O L Y T A

R N M H R R O L N R

O R G Y H E R M I A S N U G A M I D

O S W E N C G B O S

F L U T E A U D I T I O N Q U I N C E

N R L P L S E

S T A R V E L I N G P E R C O L A T E D

E R A O O O E

L A M E N T G R I D I R O N C O R G I

L E T D T E O F K N

B O D Y M O T H C O B W E B P U C K

Y S M I A O D H P E

D E M E T R I U S T H R E E S E A T E R

A I O N L H A R L R A

T I T A N I A A T L A N T A E G E U S

E R R E T N O T C N N E

S P E A R H E A D I N G L Y S A N D E R

Starwatch

Those who brave the chill nights of Janu-ary enjoy some of the best night skies of the year. Orion stands in the SSE at our map times encircled by a cohort of bright stars and fi ne constellations. Sirius, the brightest star in our sky after the Sun, twinkles feverishly low in the SE while the Pleiades glimmer high on the merid-ian. The Moon, near the horns of Taurus tonight, returns to hide some of the clus-ter’s stars on the 27th, though the occul-tations end by nightfall over the UK.

Saturn shines brightly low in the E at our map times, having risen in the ENE 70 minutes earlier. At mag 0.2, it is edging away from Leo’s brightest star Regulus as they climb together to pass high in the S another 6 hours later. Look for the Moon sandwiched between Saturn and Regulus next Saturday evening when Saturn lies 1,254m km away and shows a 20 arcsec

January diary

3rd 14h Full Moon.

4th 00h Peak of Quadrantids meteor shower.

5th 04h Jupiter 5° N of Antares.

6th 18h Saturn 0.9° S of Moon.

7th 06h Mercury in superior conjunction.

11th 13h Last quarter.

15th 17h Jupiter 6° N of Moon.

19th 04h New Moon.

20th 17h Venus 0.8° N of Moon.

25th 23h First quarter.

Saturn

South

disc through a telescope. Its globe is set like a slightly yellowish bauble within rings that reach across 45 arcsec and have their S face tipped 13 arcsec towards us.

Venus is brilliant (mag -3.9) but low down in our SW evening twilight, though its altitude at sunset does improve from 7° to 15° during the month. By the 31st it sets in the WSW 2 hours after the Sun and serves as a guide to Mercury, 7° below-right of Venus and easy to spy through binoculars at mag -0.9.

Jupiter is conspicuous before dawn though it, too, is very low down. It rises in the SE at about 06:00 tomorrow and 04:30 by the 31st, climbing 10° to 14° high in the SSE by dawn. At mag -1.8 to -1.9, it tracks eastwards in Scorpius from its place some 5° N of the red supergiant Antares in Scorpius at present. Mars, rela-tively dim at mag 1.4, hugs the SE horizon before dawn but is unlikely to be seen in the twilight.

Moonlight swamps the Quadrantids meteor shower which is active until the 6th but peaks sharply on Wednesday night. Its meteors diverge from a radi-ant that follows the Plough as it climbs through our NE sky later in the night.Alan Pickup

Air pollution

London low

SE England low

SW England low

S Cent England low

Channel Islands low

SE Anglia low

NE Anglia low

E Midlands low

W Midlands low

S Wales low

Cent Wales low

N Wales low

NE England low

NW England low

Scotland low

N Ire/Ireland low

Around the world

UK and Ireland Noon Summary

Ajaccio 17 63 Sunny

Algiers 17 63 Sunny

Alicante 19 66 Sunny

Ams’dam 11 52 Cloudy

Athens 10 50 Fair

Auckland 17 63 Fair

B Aires 28 82 Sunny

Bangkok 31 88 Sunny

Barcelona 15 59 Sunny

Basra 10 50 Sunny

Beijing -3 27 Fair

Belgrade 3 37 Fair

Berlin 10 50 Cloudy

Bermuda 21 70 Fair

Bordeaux 15 59 Cloudy

Boston 2 36 Snow

Brussels 9 48 Cloudy

Budapest -2 28 Fog

Cairo 16 61 Rain

Calcutta 24 75 Fair

Cape Town 18 64 Fair

C’blanca 17 63 Sunny

Chicago 8 46 Fog

Christ’rch 9 48 Fair

C’hagen 8 46 Showers

Corfu 13 55 Sunny

Dakar 30 86 Fair

Dallas 12 54 Cloudy

Denver -8 18 Fair

Dhaka 22 72 Fair

Dublin 11 52 Showers

Faro 18 64 Sunny

Florence 15 59 Drizzle

Frankfurt 10 50 Cloudy

Funchal 21 70 Sunny

Geneva 12 54 Cloudy

Gibraltar 15 59 Fair

Harare 26 79 Fair

Helsinki 5 41 Drizzle

H Kong 22 72 Sunny

Innsbruck 4 39 Sunny

Istanbul 7 45 Sunny

Jerusalem 11 52 Rain

Jo’burg 23 73 Sunny

Karachi 27 81 Fair

K’mandu 16 61 Fair

Kingston 33 91 Fair

K Lumpur 29 84 Fair

Larnaca 14 57 Cloudy

Lima 24 75 Cloudy

Lisbon 14 57 Fog

London 12 54 Fair

L Angeles 16 61 Sunny

Lux’bourg 8 46 Cloudy

Madrid 8 46 Cloudy

Majorca 17 63 Fair

Malaga 16 61 Sunny

Malta 17 63 Cloudy

Melb’rne 28 82 Fair

Mexico C 24 75 Fair

Miami 27 81 Fair

Milan 8 46 Sunny

Mombasa 32 90 Sunny

Montreal -8 18 Snow

Moscow -2 28 Fog

Mumbai 30 86 Fair

Munich 10 50 Sunny

Nairobi 20 68 Cloudy

Naples 13 55 Sunny

New Delhi 16 61 Fair

N Orleans 22 72 Cloudy

New York 6 43 Cloudy

Nice 15 59 Sunny

Oporto 16 61 Cloudy

Oslo 1 34 Fog

Paris 10 50 Cloudy

Perth 35 95 Sunny

Prague 9 48 Sunny

Reykjavik 2 36 Sunny

Rhodes 13 55 Sunny

Rio de J 23 73 Rain

Rome 13 55 Cloudy

Shanghai 12 54 Cloudy

Singapore 30 86 Cloudy

St P’burg 2 36 Cloudy

Stockh’m 5 41 Sunny

Strasb’g 13 55 Sunny

Sydney 24 75 Cloudy

Tel Aviv 11 52 Rain

Tenerife 23 73 Sunny

Tokyo 9 48 Sunny

Toronto 0 32 Mist

Tunis 16 61 Sunny

Vancouv’r 5 41 Sunny

Venice 5 41 Fair

Vienna 0 32 Fog

Warsaw 9 48 Cloudy

Wash’ton 6 43 Fog

Well’ton 12 54 Fair

Zurich 11 52 SunnyReports for noon yesterday (previous day in the Americas)

Around the UK and Ireland

Sun Rain Temp (°C) Weather hrs mm High/Low (day)

Sun Rain Temp (°C) Weather hrs mm High/Low (day)

Aberdeen 0.0 9.9 7 1 Gales

Anglesey 0.1 2.0 11 9 Gales

Aviemore 0.0 13.2 6 2 Gales

Belfast 0.7 4.1 11 4 Showers

Belmullet 2.8 22.4 9 6 Showers

Birmingham 1.4 5.1 11 6 Rain

Bognor Regis 0.0 0.8 11 10 Rain

Bournemouth 0.0 5.1 13 9 Rain

Bristol 0.0 7.9 12 7 Rain

Buxton 0.5 1.3 10 4 Rain

Cardiff 0.0 0.3 12 9 Cloudy

Clacton n/a

Colwyn Bay 0.6 6.1 12 8 Rain

Cork 1.3 8.9 8 4 Fair

Cromer 0.0 13.5 9 6 Cloudy

Dublin 3.9 2.0 9 6 Sunny

Eastbourne 0.0 3.0 13 10 Rain

Edinburgh 0.0 5.1 10 5 Gales

Eskdalemuir 0.0 12.4 8 4 Gales

Falmouth 0.0 8.4 12 10 Rain

Fishguard 0.0 5.3 11 7 Rain

Glasgow 0.0 15.2 8 5 Gales

Guernsey 0.0 1.0 14 9 Cloudy

Hastings 0.0 3.0 12 10 Rain

Hayling Island 0.0 4.1 12 9 Rain

Herne Bay 0.0 1.0 12 9 Cloudy

Hunstanton 0.0 22.9 11 6 Cloudy

Isle of Man 0.0 6.6 12 8 Rain

Isle of Wight 0.0 1.5 12 10 Rain

Jersey 0.9 0.8 13 10 Rain

Keswick n/a

Kilkenny – 1.8 9 6 Sunny

Kinloss 0.0 3.8 8 4 Rain

Knock 3.7 7.1 6 3 Showers

Leeds – – 11 6 Gales

Lerwick 0.7 4.3 7 4 Hail

Leuchars 0.0 5.6 8 3 Thunder

London 0.0 9.4 12 9 Rain

Lowestoft 0.4 2.0 11 7 Cloudy

Malin Head 1.9 7.1 7 5 Fair

Manchester 0.0 1.5 11 6 Gales

Margate 0.0 0.8 12 8 Dull

Newcastle – 4.1 10 5 Gales

Newquay 0.0 4.8 13 8 Rain

Norwich – – 10 8 Rain

Oxford 0.0 7.6 12 6 Rain

Prestatyn 1.3 1.3 13 8 Rain

Ross-on-Wye 0.0 8.6 12 7 Rain

Rosslare 1.6 22.1 10 8 Showers

Saunton Sands 0.0 3.8 13 8 Rain

Scarborough 0.0 1.0 10 4 Dull

Shannon 2.5 5.3 9 6 Cloudy

Shrewsbury 0.4 7.1 11 6 Rain

Skegness n/a

Southend – 5.8 12 8 Cloudy

Southport 0.0 0.3 12 6 Showers

Stornoway 0.0 5.3 8 4 Gales

Swanage 0.0 6.3 13 9 Showers

Teignmouth 0.0 6.6 14 9 Rain

Tenby 0.0 7.9 12 9 Showers

Tiree 0.0 12.7 9 5 Gales

Torquay 0.0 12.2 14 8 Showers

Valentia 0.5 9.9 10 7 Showers

Weymouth 0.0 5.3 12 7 Showers

Key

Channel Is

Shetlands

-10°

-5°

-15°

0°

5°

10°

15°

20°

25°

30°

35°

Wind

Showers

Partly cloudy

Rain

Light rain

Sunny intervals

992

996

1000

1004

1008

1012

1016

6

6

6

7

7

8

10

10

33

33

28

Very rough

Rough

Rough

London, E Anglia, E Midlands, Lincolnshire

Mostly dry with sunny spells and the odd shower.

Brisk westerly winds. Max temp 7-10C (45-50F).

Tonight, dry. Min temp 3-6C (37-43F).

England, Cent S England Sunny spells with

scattered showers mostly on the south coast.

Fresh westerly winds. Max temp 8-11C (46-52F).

Tonight, showers. Min temp 4-7C (39-45F).

W Midlands, Yorkshire, NE England Sunny

spells with blustery showers mostly in the west.

Brisk westerly winds. Max temp 6-9C (43-48F).


Channel Is, SW England, Wales, NW England

Heavy showers, some with hail and thunder. They

will be wintry on the high ground. Fresh to strong

westerly winds. Max temp 8-11C (46-52F).


Northern Ireland, Ireland Sunny spells with

showers. Some will be heavy with a risk of hail

and thunder. Brisk to strong westerly winds will

strengthen in the west later. Max temp 6-9C (43-

48F). Tonight, showers. Min temp 2-5C (36-41F).

SW Scotland, NW Scotland, W Isles, N Isles

Showers, some heavy with hail and thunder. They

will fall as sleet or snow on the hills. Fresh to

strong westerly winds. Max temp 5-8C (41-46F).


SE Scotland, NE Scotland Showers, mostly

aff ecting the Central Belt and the west. Brisk

westerly winds. Max temp 5-8C (41-46F).

Tonight, showers. Min temp 0 to 3C (32-37F).

°C °F Weather °C °F Weather °C °F Weather °C °F Weather

Sun & Moon

Sun rises 0806

Sun sets 1602

Moon sets 0633

Moon rises 1328

Full moon January 3

Lighting up

Belfast 1608 to 0846

Birmingham 1604 to 0818

Bristol 1612 to 0816

Dublin 1616 to 0840

Glasgow 1554 to 0847

London 1602 to 0806

Manchester 1600 to 0825

Newcastle 1549 to 0831

Grains of weed pollen per cubic metre

of air: low (0-20); moderate (21-40);

high (41-100); very high (100+)

High tides

Met Offi ce report for 24 hours to 6pm yesterday. Irish locations (sunshine from previous day) supplied by MeteoGroup

Aberdeen 1127 4.0m 2350 4.0m

Avonmouth 0451 11.3m 1725 11.6m

Belfast 0854 3.3m 2124 3.3m

Dover 0848 6.1m 2128 6.0m

Galway 0251 4.7m 1518 4.7m

Greenock 1015 3.2m 2254 3.2m

Harwich 0917 3.5m 2158 3.5m

Holyhead 0819 5.1m 2042 5.2m

Hull 0349 6.8m 1636 6.7m

Leith 0002 5.0m 1239 5.0m

Liverpool 0912 8.5m 2136 8.7m

London Bridge 1143 6.4m – –

Penzance 0226 4.9m 1452 5.0m

Scrabster 0648 4.6m 1908 4.7m

Weymouth 0427 1.9m 1659 1.8m

Whitby 0131 5.0m 1408 5.0m

UK and Ireland Five day forecast Atlantic front Noon today

Tuesday Wednesday Thursday SaturdayFriday

High 11 Low 3 Low Q will move east. Low N will move south-east.High 12 Low 6 High 10 Low 5 High 12 Low 5 High 12 Low 5

Cold front

Occluded front

T h

Warm front

LQ

L

LN

L

H

L

1040

1032

1032

1024

10161008

1000992

984

976968

976

1016

1000

1008

1000

992984

Weather report Weather forecast

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20070101 - The Guardian - 01 - Main Paper

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